Eye on Washington

It's frosty February: The Bush administration sends down its proposed budget for fiscal 2007 and puts the generalities of the president's State of the Union message in concrete. Congress starts to make hard choices-between programs attractive to members' constituents and federal revenues constrained by promised tax cuts and a ballooning federal deficit. And now that Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr., has been confirmed as the newest justice of the Supreme Court, the Senate Judiciary Committee will turn its attention to the vexing question of whether domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency is compatible with the Constitution.