American Notes CONGRESS

"God bless ye, weary gentlemen," intoned Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd in a nearly empty Senate chamber at 4:15 a.m. one day last week. Across the Capitol, in the more festive House, Massachusetts Republican Silvio Conte urged merrily, "On Whitten, on Natcher, on Michel and Wright; On Conte, on Foley, let's finish tonight."

Ho, ho, ho! With that bit of self-congratulatory humbug, Congress completed work on a budget that should have been finished three months earlier. For the second straight year, the legislators tossed all 13 appropriations bills into a massive single "continuing resolution" without which the Government would clank to a halt. This year's 2,300-page manuscript kept company with a "reconciliation bill" that detailed the tax hikes and spending cuts decreed by a White House-Congress summit last November to cut the deficit by some $76 billion over two years. Despite its elephantine size, the final product may have but a mousy impact on a stock market struggling to recover from Black Monday.