The White House formally threatened a veto of the House version of a surface transportation bill, opening the question of whether any long-term bill will get signed before March when current funding on roads and bridges expires. Between the terrible House version and the Senate’s, it’s choosing between one with a bunch of disastrous elements, and another which has none of those but which is too small for the task at hand.

TransCanada still has not settled on a route for its Keystone Pipeline that bypasses or protects the aquifer in Nebraska, as requested by Nebraska (GOP) officials. That delay means the project couldn’t come on line until 2015 at the earliest, despite GOP attempts to co-opt the Obama Administration’s permit regime.

Senate Democrats have a plan for the payroll tax cut legislation that House Republicans basically gave up on yesterday. They can add the Unemployment Insurance extension and “doc fix” to the payroll bill, along with offsets for the UI and “fix” that the GOP might buy, and force the whole package on the House as the deadline nears.

Despite fierce opposition from major transit unions, the Senate yesterday gave final approval to the FAA Authorization bill, a five-year extension that removes uncertainty from the FAA, approves a next-generation air traffic monitoring system and, in Harry Reid’s telling, creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. But unions were unhappy about changes to labor law insisted upon by House Republicans, and they expressed betrayal at the hands of Senate Democrats.

The Senate will vote as early as today on whether to punish transportation unions in a bid to get Federal Aviation Administration authorization through 2015. The House already passed its version of a “bipartisan compromise.” and unions can’t seem to get the Senate to stop it.

The STOCK Act was a media-driven bill that politicians felt they could not resist after 60 Minutes ran a (somewhat flawed) exposé on the insider trading activities of members of Congress. Once a must-pass bill like that gets into circulation, it’s going to become an attractive target for messaging amendments where members try to hitch a ride with their pet issues. And because Congress is held in low public esteem, the best of these amendments would deal with the same kind of ethics issues.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act fixed a problem created by the Supreme Court, which had made it difficult for victims of pay discrimination to sue. But the Act could have been combined with other measures to strengthen enforcement of fair pay rules. It wasn’t; the stronger measures were blocked, and the practical effect of the Fair Pay Act has been minimal.

collection of 18 transportation unions have demanded that Congress reject a compromise measure on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Authorization bill which they say will hurt unions. Unions like the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, Teamsters, the International Association of Machinists, the Association of Flight Attendants (CWA) and more object to several hidden provisions in the authorization bill apparently agreed to by Dem leaders.

We learned yesterday that it’s very, very difficult for members of Congress to vote to effectively legalize insider trading for themselves. If it wasn’t for that meddling 60 Minutes, this wouldn’t be an issue. So difficult, in fact, that the motion to proceed on the bill stopping the practice passed 93-2 yesterday.

I don’t know if anything’s going to get done in Congress in 2012, but one thing is becoming clear – Senate Democrats will try to put Republicans up against the wall on taxes. They already have on the record multiple instances of Republicans voting almost in unison against millionaire’s surtaxes. Now we’ll see votes on fossil fuel subsidies and that alternative minimum corporate tax the President mentioned in the State of the Union and other tax fairness issues.