An omnibus spending bill containing $8 billion in earmarks — many from Republican senators who awkwardly opposed the bill — failed, and Congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government at current levels until March without funding for the implementation of financial or health care reform.

President Obama signed an extension of the Bush tax cuts — as expected — wherein he kept the support of liberal voters and neutralized conservative opposition. In the deal was a 13-month extension of unemployment insurance, which will end short-term — but painful — unfunded lapses that hurt the purchasing power of the economy.

These initiatives gave most of the tea party what they wanted. On the same day of TWI’s preview, I attended a small tea party rally outside the Capitol. Dallas Woodhouse, the North Carolina state director for Americans for Prosperity, told me at the rally that their group wanted Congress to pass a “clean, continuing resolution to fund the government” and an extension of the Bush tax cuts. (The Tea Party Patriots did make a last-minute push against the tax cut deal comparing it to the Troubled Asset Relief Program; however, the deal was consistently popular.)

The DREAM Act, a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented workers who come to the United States as minors, did not pass and certainly won’t pass in the next Congress either with a Republican majority in the House and a more powerful Republican minority in the Senate. Activists did lobby Congress hard, and got three Republican votes in the Senate. (The measure passed the House.) But in the end, even a small sliver of the immigration debate proved to be too much to resolve — paradoxically, though the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government is in charge of immigration policy, Congress remains paralyzed over the issue.

Then there were three pieces of legislation that looked dead in the water, but were passed thanks to some heavy lifting.

Congress repealed the military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian servicemembers — “don’t ask, don’t tell” — just over a week after it failed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. This vote was after the exhaustive Pentagon report — endorsed by Secretary of Defense Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen — showing few, if any, potential negative effects in repealing the policy. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) was dedicated to repealing the policy, and pushed for it to be a standalone bill — and it passed both chambers.

The START treaty limiting nuclear arms with Russia also looked dead after Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) — negotiating for the Republican caucus — said on November 16 it couldn’t be done in the lame-duck session. However, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden and the White House lobbied Republican senators, and Republican opposition collapsed Tuesday. It will very likely be ratified Wednesday by the Senate with over 70 votes.

The Food Safety Modernization Act also looked like that it would languish because a provision in the Senate bill violated the origination clause of the Constitution. However, the Senate suddenly passed the House bill by a voice vote Sunday, without the objection of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who had filibustered the bill. That version of the bill passed in the House Tuesday. The bill gives the Food and Drug Administration authority over 80 percent of the food supply, to prevent foodborne illnesses.

Congress adjourns Wednesday — three days before Christmas. Larry Sabato, University Professor of Politics and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, tweeted, “It’s official. Like it or not, this lame-duck session is the most productive of the 15 held since WWII.”

Video after the jump:

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton (Ron Lewis/San Mateo County Times/ZUMA Press)

In a potential preview of conservative arguments for rejecting the Obama administration’s new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia in the Senate, John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, said the treaty reflected “stunning naivete” and placed it in the context of threats to American sovereignty during a wide-ranging speech to the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday.

[Security1] Bolton, an influential conservative foreign policy official for decades, accused the Obama administration of harboring “a very different view of American sovereignty than a long line of presidents, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt.” Relying on portions of quotes by senior officials and an undefined category of people he characterized as the “international left” and the “academic left,” Bolton said the administration attaches a “near theological significance” to the power of international institutions whose actions threaten the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution.

Tying ratification of the treaty, which cuts American and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles by 30 percent, to the broader question of the survival of American sovereignty raises the stakes for a key Obama administration priority. In his announcement of the treaty on Friday, President Obama linked it to his vision of a world ultimately free of nuclear weapons, a priority conservatives have derided. Ratification, already an uncertain prospect in a fiercely partisan Senate, will require the votes of at least eight Republican senators, a task made more difficult by the influential Bolton’s portrayal of the treaty as commensurate with a broader assault by Obama on constitutional values.

Advances in arms control would have “a cumulative impact on our sovereignty,” Bolton argued. While he declined to address the merits of the treaty — whose text has not yet been released — Bolton said it reflected Obama’s “almost religious view in the obligations and implications of treaties.” He scoffed at the president’s statement that the U.S.-Russian reduction in their countries’ nuclear stockpiles, which represent over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, would strengthen global arms control efforts, and suggested that it would spur rogue-state nuclear proliferation.

“I think the people in places like Teheran and Pyongyang say, ‘Fantastic — the United States is coming down, let’s ramp up our production efforts to get to the [nuclear] capability even more quickly,’” Bolton said. “The rhetoric of the arms control advocates often is very divorced from important and legitimate American security concerns.”

Beyond the so-called New START treaty itself, Bolton tied Obama’s foreign policy to what he called a “globalist” effort at replacing ultimate fidelity to the Constitution with fealty to international accords and institutions, a longtime conservative bogeyman, and contrasted it with his own “Americanist” perspective.

“I think if you ask most international law scholars, they’d say, ‘Of course international law trumps the Constitution,’” Bolton said, yoking Obama to that position and suggesting that the administration will never abandon it. “This is a decisive question that we ought to be asking politicians: In the priority, in the hierarchy of legal systems, where does the Constitution fit?”

At least one administration official, State Department legal counsel Harold Koh, came under attack last year for allegedly privileging international law above the Constitution, although Koh last week defended the administration’s legal right to launch drone strikes on al-Qaeda targets far from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Bolton’s framing comes amid the growing influence of Tea Party activists who frequently question Obama’s devotion to the Constitution, and who are seething over the administration’s recent victory in passing health care reform. It also comes as Republicans in the Senate consider whether they ought to sign the New START treaty or to deal the administration’s agenda an embarrassing international setback.

Senate Republicans have yet to coalesce around a position on New START, especially as Congress enjoys a two-week recess. But the early signs from Senate GOP leaders have not been positive. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) wrote a letter to Obama the day the treaty was announced, warning that even preambular language remotely linking European missile defense to the treaty is unacceptable, despite public declarations from senior Obama officials flatly stating that the treaty will not hinder missile defense. The early strategy from multiple administration officials to pass the treaty is to remind Republicans, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton did Friday, that nuclear weapons treaties with the Russians historically sail through the Senate with over 90 votes.

Jamie Fly, the executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a conservative foreign policy messaging and advocacy organization, said that while skepticism of the treaty’s verification mechanisms and relationship to missile defense is pronounced, he was unsure “anyone on the right is really ready to say [the treaty] shouldn’t be ratified.” Fly said his organization would await the actual text of New START before taking a position, though he added that FPI was “not huge fans of the Russia Reset,” the Obama administration’s effort to revitalize bilateral relations with Russia. “Everyone I’ve talked to on Capitol Hill and around town is in a wait-and-see mode,” he said.

Bolton, a fixture on Fox News, widened the aperture for criticism of New START, urging conservatives to press politicians on sovereignty issues. “We have to insist on getting clear answers from candidates for Congress, from incumbent members of Congress, from the presidential candidates as we get into the presidential season in the not-too-distant future,” Bolton said, “to make it clear that we view sovereignty and the preservation of American sovereignty as a high priority.”

OBAMA: On missile defense, we have agreed that we are going to continue to discuss this critical issue. That is part of the joint statements that we’ve signed. I also believe that it is entirely legitimate for our discussions to talk not only about offensive weapon systems but also defensive weapon systems.

Obama went on to clarify that the missile defense system in question was “designed to deal with an entirely different threat unrelated to the kinds of robust capabilities that Russia possesses.” This falls in line with Obama’s intent to “reset” relations with Russia by acknowledging the country’s viewpoint on issues that the Bush administration failed to discuss with Russia.

Medvedev seemed optimistic, remarking that Obama’s willingness even to open up discussion on the issue was a change from the previous administration’s tendency to make decisions without consulting Russia. “Our understanding is that these decisions do concern us and we will have to come to terms on these positions,” he stated, emphasizing continued consideration of “what configuration on the whole the global anti-ballistic missile defense could have.”

Talk of a “global anti-ballistic missile defense” system is indicative of the increased cooperation between the countries seen in other aspects of today’s talks. These included an opening of supply routes to Afghanistan, a joint commitment to help the Afghan government fight drug trafficking, a pledge to reduce strategic arms past the levels outlined in the expiring START treaty, and an agreement to enhance the security of nuclear facility and materials.