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Nuclear deal with India tops agenda, says White House

Bush meets Democrats ahead of session

Washington: The White House has said that the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal is one of the ``top'' issues for the administration in the lame duck session (meet following a general election) of the U.S. Congress.

President George W. Bush has had a meeting with senior Senate Democratic leaders in a bid to get his agenda through Congress.

"The top of the list, if you start taking a look at the lame duck session, we've already laid out a series of things on which both sides can work right now: the India civil nuclear deal, a free-trade agreement with Vietnam,'' White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters when asked to list the top issues for the session.

After his meeting with Mr. Bush, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who is tipped to become the Senate Majority Leader, said the first order of business when the session gets under way next year is Congressional oversight.

Mr. Reid also stressed that the President and the group of Senators had discussed several issues and hoped that the spirit of bi-partisanship will be reflected at the lame duck session.

"The first order of business when we reorganise after the first of the year is Congressional oversight. Let's find out what's going on with the war in Iraq, the different large Federal agencies that we have. There simply has been no oversight in recent years,'' Mr. Reid told reporters here.

``And I don't want to frighten anyone about investigations. Congressional oversight is not a negative term. People talk about investigations. There will be times, on rare occasions, when subpoenas will have to be offered, but rarely. If Congress does its job, and does Congressional oversight as it's been done for more than 200 years, it's good for everyone,'' he said.

``The President talked about my theme, which is bipartisanship. And I said to him, `We have been six years, and we have two years to go to see if this will work. I hope we will. We have two ways of showing this. The first is in the lame duck and then, of course, after we come back, the first of the year','' he said.

``There are so many important issues we can work on together. We talked about immigration... education, Iraq, energy. There are a lot of things that we need to work on, and we hope the President is sincere.

``Nothing can be accomplished in this town unless it's on a bipartisan basis. That's the way it goes,'' he said.

Indications are that the Senate is likely to schedule the civilian nuclear deal sometime next week.

Sources said Republicans and Democrats have to first come to terms on a number of other contentious issues before the rank ordering of the priorities are done by the leaderships.

It is pointed out that the nuclear deal has not only good bipartisan support in the Senate but is also one of the least contentious bills. — PTI

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