"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But you can keep your scientists, engineers, and other skilled workers, cause we don't want 'em!"

That's what I imagine Emma Lazarus would write if she were composing lines for "The New Colossus" today. Her famous sonnet, originally written in 1883 and engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, has welcomed new immigrants from afar for over a century. But now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is putting the kibosh on H-1B visas. The agency began accepting applications on Monday for the coveted temporary visas—which are designated for foreign workers with hi-tech or other specialized skills—for the 2008 fiscal year, which starts on October 1. By mid-afternoon, it had already received 150,000 petitions. Now the government is saying that it won't accept any more requests. Congress caps the number of H-1B visas at 65,000 per year, plus an additional 20,000 for workers who have an advanced degree from an American university. The government is going to use a computer program (undoubtedly developed by some people who were in the country on H-1B visas) to conduct a lottery of eligible applicants. Tech companies are crying foul. One-third of Microsoft's U.S.-based employees are in the country on H-1B visas. The rate is similar at other hi-tech companies, where foreign expertise is highly valued. Accordingly, executives at tech companies are lobbying Congress to raise the caps. 

In the meantime, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the Senate last week that would curtail the use of H-1B visas by companies, requiring them to make greater efforts to hire American workers. That's all nice and good in theory, but let's face reality. There simply aren't enough qualified Americans with the necessary engineering skills. As Robert Hoffman, vice president at Oracle, says: 

Our broken visa policies for highly educated foreign professionals are not only counterproductive, they are anticompetitive and detrimental to America's long-term economic competitiveness."

TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden this morning, President Bush put on an impressive display of disgust over Congress's failure to send him a supplemental bill for funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more than $100 billion in additional funds have been lingering in Congress for 57 days now. "They left for spring break without finishing their work," Mr. Bush said. His indignation is understandable. It is inexcusable that half the Senate is out campaigning for president, while a supplemental appropriations bill for funding ongoing war operations sits idle.

But if the President is really serious about getting the troops the funding he says they deserve, why doesn't he recall Congress and force them to get back to work? Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution stipulates that Bush "may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them."

Bush says that Congress ought "to send me this unacceptable bill as quickly as possible when they come back. I'll veto it, and then Congress can get down to business of funding our troops without strings and without delay." Fair enough. So why not recall the Congress immediately and force them to send up a bill? Otherwise, Bush's righteous indignation smacks of the very political posturing he accuses the Democratic Congress of peddling.

Pool/Getty Images

Shots rang out today in Baghdad's Shorja market, where yesterday U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful John McCain took an hour-long Sunday stroll. Located just three minutes from the Green Zone, McCain used Shorja to make a point that Americans were not getting an accurate picture of the security situation in Baghdad. The security detail for McCain's visit included more than 100 U.S. troops, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships.

Today, however, shots were heard in the market, where, on average, one person is killed each day. The security situation in market is so bad, most merchants will not venture into the northern part of the street, which they have dubbed "The Sniper Zone."

McCain reportedly told merchants to hang in there:

Abu Samir, 31, said McCain bought an Egyptian rug from him and told him through an interpreter: "I want to run for president. And, don't worry, because I'll handle the war better than Bush."

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Washington's chattering classes are suggesting that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will be gone as early as this week. Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. There's no precedent for such a move in the Bush White House. Remember Don Rumsfeld? The default play is to ride out the storm until the bitter end. Republicans and Democrats alike spent years calling for Rummy's resignation. Even Sen. John McCain, a loyal Bush soldier on Iraq, lost confidence in him. But Rumsfeld lasted longer than most observers thought he could.

Ultimately, it wasn't torture at Abu Ghraib or losing a war in Iraq that cost Rumsfeld his job. It was the White House's need to protect Karl Rove. Rove lost an election, so Rumsfeld got fired. It will probably take a similar bit of calculus to force Gonzales to leave, too. If Karl Rove is in danger, Gonzales will go. If Rove is safe, Gonzales won't be added to his list of victims, which already includes Scooter Libby and Rumsfeld. As Ed Henry said on CNN this morning:

[T]he bottom line is if this White House has to choose between protecting Karl Rove or protecting Alberto Gonzales in order for this controversy to go away, they'll choose Karl Rove, protecting him. Because the bottom line is they can get another attorney general, they can't get another Karl Rove.

We probably won't know how much trouble Rove is in until after he talks to Congress. Until then, those who predicted Karl Rove's decline last November had better start running for cover.

Why are big U.S. companies lining up to urge new regulations on global warming?

Leading US financial investors joined some of the country’s largest ­companies on Monday and urged Capitol Hill to follow Europe by setting mandatory targets to reduce US carbon emissions.

It's not because they've suddenly become tree-hugging, granola-eating hippies. It's because big businesses thrive on certainty. Their worst nightmare is dealing with a confusing patchwork of laws in different states, regions, and countries. The writing is on the wall: Carbon caps are coming to the United States. But U.S. companies fear a tsunami of haphazard initiatives that will raise their costs, such as British Columbia's new green alliance with California, or worse, climate policy made sporadically by the courts. Better from their perspective to have one system nationwide that's in tune with the European Union's laws, harsh as they may be.

Much has been made of what a bad recent stretch this has been for the White House. First, there was the Walter Reed debacle, then the Scooter Libby verdict. Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill plotted ways to limit President Bush's leverage in Iraq, even as the Bushes were greeted as war criminals on the first leg of their Latin America tour in São Paulo, Brazil.

Certainly, those were all blows to a White House that is, by most accounts, already demoralized. But maybe they were also the sour points that the White House wanted us to see. Even as Walter Reed and Scooter Libby received all the press, what may be the biggest and baddest scandal of the Bush presidency to date began to percolate this week, mostly under the radar.

Early in the week, we learned that two Republican members of New Mexico's Congressional delegation may have pressured former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias on cases that involved investigating Democrats. This brought more attention to the fact that Iglesias was one of eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration late last year. Seven were let go for failing to follow administration policy, and one was fired so that a politically ambitious former aide to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove could take his place, the administration has said.

At the center of all this is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who had the authority to appoint replacements that could serve indefinitely. Today, New York Times scribe Paul Krugman, who admittedly has conspiratorial tendencies, uses his column to reveal data that suggests a wider scandal may involve Gonzales and the U.S. attorneys still in office. Here's the gist:

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats.... Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny."

Yesterday, Gonzales announced that he was removing himself from the hiring process for U.S. attorneys. As Andrew Sullivan notes, that's "an astonishing concession to the gravity of the charges." Sure, to say nothing of the fact that this is a guy who, less than two years ago, was short-listed to become a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The days of the mainstream media being hands off when it comes to Gonzales are over. If more evidence of unethical and potentially illegal actions comes to light, Gonzales may have little choice but to resign. And that would make all the hype over Scooter Libby look pretty silly.

This just in:

WASHINGTON, March 8 — House Democratic leaders intensified their debate with President Bush over Iraq today as they announced legislation that would pull American combat troops out of Iraq before the fall of 2008.

"Only then can we refocus our military efforts on Afghanistan to the extent that we must," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. She said the Iraq withdrawal deadline would be attached to legislation providing nearly $100 billion requested by the Bush administration for the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and money to expand health care for veterans.

So it looks like Pelosi is rejecting the approach urged by Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman:

When Congress appropriates money, it can attach riders that can contain instructions saying, "We've spent $350 billion, and we hereby tell you that you can spend $150 billion more." You can then translate that into a time limit by dividing by, say, $9 billion a month in order to get a figure for the number of months. The Congressional Budget Office could be the referee, since it's already keeping tabs on how much money the government is spending on the military and in Iraq.

[With this approach,] nobody can argue that simply saying, "You will not spend more than $500 billion on the Iraq war" is beyond the power of Congress. No argument at all. There will be arguments if Congress explicitly says, "You have to get out in 10 months." But one is really the other.

Get ready for arguments. 

I was just wondering, does the military have a plan to, if necessary, to go into Syria to go to the source of any weapons coming from Syria? That are going to Sunni insurgents? That are killing our troops [in Iraq]? … I think we ought to take action on all fronts including Syria and any other source of weapons coming in, obviously Iran is the focus – but it shouldn’t be the sole focus."

-U.S. Democratic Senator Carl Levin, Armed Services Committee Hearing, February 27, 2007

The full transcript is not online, but you can catch the YouTube clip here.

(Hat tip: Michael Ledeen at The Corner) 

Even the vaunted New York Times sometimes makes an error. This one was particularly amusing, however, with a photograph of fans of the aged metal band Slayer taking the place of a shot of Nancy Pelosi. This is a screen capture from last night:

Pelosi told her colleagues that if it appears likely that Bush wants to take the country to war against Iran, the House would take up a bill to deny him the authority to do so, according to Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly.

That's from an article in Sunday's Washington Post. But actually, says Bruce Ackerman, a top constitutional scholar at Yale, it don't work that way:

BA: The president has to get another authorization for a war against Iran. It isn’t up to Nancy Pelosi or the House to prevent him; he doesn’t have the constitutional authority to just expand the war.

FP: What about actions short of invasion: air strikes or hot pursuit?

BA: Air strikes would be an invasion .... I think that the burden is very much on the president of the United States to ask for explicit authorization for an act of war against Iran. On every major military incursion, there is an elaborate ballet where the president says he has the power to do it and the Congress says, “You don’t have the power to do it.”

On a major incursion into another large Middle Eastern country ... the president will once again request the explicit authorization of Congress. When he was contemplating the invasion of Iraq, he was in a much stronger position politically—and he was still obliged to request authorization. And the same thing would happen again.

Ackerman may be optimistic here, given what we know about the Bush administration, and given Ayatollah Khamenei's repeated threat that Iran will retaliate if attacked. Matthew Yglesias outlines one scenario that could lead to war without Congressional authorization:

Say Israel bombs Natanz and Bush supports the Israelis diplomatically and warns Iran against retaliating. Then in Iraq there's some dramatic attack against US forces. In response, the President proclaims that the attacks were organized by Iran and orders, without first asking congress, a retaliatory bombing of Revolutionary Guard facilities. The military is going to obey that order, right? And congress isn't going to impeach and convict Bush, thus removing him from office, replacing him with Dick Cheney, right?

I'm surprised there hasn't been more media hype of James Baker's upcoming visit to the Hill today:

James A. Baker III, the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, has ended weeks of resistance and today will testify before Congress on the war, avoiding a split with his fellow co-chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.). 

Sources familiar with the efforts to persuade Baker to testify said he did not want to appear to be lobbying against President Bush at the height of his push for 21,500 additional troops in Iraq.

Baker will answer senators’ questions today during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which includes three Democratic presidential hopefuls and Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), the chamber’s most forceful Republican critic of the war, who also is mulling a White House bid.

I suppose a combination of Baker's desire to keep a low profile and the general understanding that the surge is a foregone conclusion explains the lack of coverage. Baker knows he got outmaneuvered. The hearing will be this afternoon at 1 p.m. My only question is whether Baker will push back on National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley's attempt to claim that the surge is, in fact, what the Iraq Study Group recommended.

Also in progress this morning: a pro forma nomination hearing on John Negroponte's move to the State Department, where he will become Condi's deputy and her potential successor.

Was it just us, or was Dick Cheney texting during the big speech? What was so important?

Our guess:

Cheney: U R soooo lucky.

Gonzalez: Tell me about it.

Cheney: I 4got, no red wine. Furniture @ [undisclosed location] isn't scotch-guarded.

Gonzalez: n/p. btw, I tried on your power ties... So where do you keep the launch codes?

Cheney: Check next to the Wii.

Gonzalez: I still haven't spotted Hastert.

Cheney: Denny, where R U?

HouseSpeaker4Eva: I can't see. I'm sitting behind Dikembe Mutombo.

Cheney: Yo, we miss U up here big guy.

Log on to Passport tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST, as we live-blog President Bush's State of the Union address and the Democratic response.

While debuting a new Washington sensation called State of the Union Bingo, we'll be watching to see whether Bush gives Nancy Pelosi a peck on the cheek after the House Sergeant at Arms calls out "Madame Speaker" for the first time in history.

More seriously, despite reports to the contrary, we're expecting a speech that will seriously engage foreign policy issues, not least of all Iraq and Iran. Bush and his speech writers know that Iraq—and only Iraq—will define his legacy. Now is the time to start spinning history. Only two presidents, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon, have had lower approval ratings before a State of the Union address. Iraq is the proverbial elephant in the room; ignoring it to focus solely on "domestic" issues will only drive those abysmal numbers lower. With Congressional Republicans bailing ship over the "surge," we're looking for Bush to be typically unrepentant.

We'll also be watching the applause-o-meter more closely tonight than at any time in the last six years. Pay attention to how the Dems respond on two key issues that aren't "domestic" at all: immigration and climate change. The new leadership in Congress has opened up new opportunities for Bush on both fronts. We should be able to gauge almost immediately where those issues are headed.

Please join us tonight.

While questioning Condoleezza Rice at yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer implied that Condi isn't going to pay a personal price for sending more troops to Iraq because she is a single female:

Now, the issue is who pays the price. Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Not-so-subtle dig alert. According to Political Punch, Boxer's office insists she was just trying to draw attention to the fact that few policymakers' families are affected by the war in Iraq. But here's my question: Would Sen. Boxer dare make this point to a single general without kids? Or another administration official, say, like Stephen Hadley (who has two teenage daughters) in a hearing? Aside from being in bad taste, it's just egregiously petty politics. The insinuation here, whether intended by Sen. Boxer or not, is two-fold: 1) There must be something wrong with a woman who chooses not to have a family and 2) that such a decision brings into question the woman's judgment.

There's also some ugly foreshadowing here. Condi is going to increasingly face this question in the next few years if she has political ambitions. The fact that she isn't married and has no children is a liability in American politics. It shouldn't be, but it is. The second is Boxer's insinuation that people without family members in the military may be less capable of critically judging a situation or more easily convinced to place troops in harm's way. I'm no fan of the surge plan. But implying that because Condi doesn't have a child of military age, she's less qualified or incapable of comprehending the gravity of decisions is just hitting below the belt.