President Barack Obama faced fired-up Republican foes as the US Congress returned to work on Monday to face off on tax cuts, government spending and a landmark nuclear treaty with Russia.
Two weeks after voters thrashed his Democrats, costing them Senate seats and control of the House of Representatives, Obama promised a shift from an "obsessive focus" on his agenda to a kinder, gentler politics of compromise.
"I am very confident that the American people were not issuing a mandate for gridlock. They want to see us make progress," the president told reporters on Sunday aboard his Washington-bound Air Force One airplane after a trip to Asia.
For Obama's Democratic allies, the so-called "lame duck" year-end session was their last chance to flex their large Senate and House of Representatives majorities before a new Congress takes office in January.
In a sign of the changes to come, roughly 100 new lawmakers, mostly Republicans, were attending seminars on ethics rules, navigating potential legal minefields, and recruiting and paying staff.
Obama, who invited top congressional leaders of both parties to a November 18 summit, has warned Republicans determined to thwart his agenda and deny him a second term that they now have a share of government.
"Campaigning is very different than governing," he said. "My expectation is... they are not going to want to just obstruct, they are going to want to engage constructively."
Both sides have expressed hopes of reaching a compromise on renewing sweeping tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 with a built-in expiration date at the end of this year.
Republicans want all of the rates to remain the same beyond January 1, warning that any tax increase will hurt sputtering US economic growth and damage efforts to lower stubbornly high unemployment of near 10 percent.
Obama and top Democrats want to extend middle-class tax cuts but say the country "cannot afford" to do the same for those in the uppermost income brackets, which carry a price tag of roughly 700 billion dollars over 10 years.
Lawmakers will also have to pass legislation funding government operations, as the Congress did not send Obama any of the annual spending measures during the regular session - and there, too, a fight is brewing.
Republicans made slashing government spending a key plank of their platform ahead of the elections and are now pushing to freeze outlays at 2008 levels and suspend new hires and pay increases for federal workers.
And they will face pressure not to budge from arch-conservative "Tea Party" movement voters who helped power their election win.
On the foreign policy front, the US Senate faces a battle over ratifying a landmark nuclear weapons deal with Russia, the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
The treaty - signed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama at an elaborate ceremony in Prague in April - restricts each nation to a maximum of 1,550 deployed warheads, a cut of about 30 percent from a limit set in 2002.
The agreement, a top Obama foreign policy initiative, replaces a previous accord that lapsed in December 2009 and also requires ratification by Russia's lower house, the Duma.
Republicans have said they need to be sure that the US nuclear arsenal will be modernised and that the treaty will not hamper US missile defence efforts - but some acknowledged privately that they did not want to hand Obama a major diplomatic victory before the elections.
On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Robert Gates urged the US Senate to ratify the treaty without delay, warning in the Washington Post that: "Our national security depends on it."
AFP/de
