The WEEK IN REVIEW: WASHINGTON D.C.

Sunday, June 10, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

WASHINGTON - Congressional Democrats got a glimpse of a restive electorate last week when a new Washington Post poll showed their approval rating has tanked an additional 10 percentage points over the past month, in no small part because of their inability to turn the course of the war in Iraq.

Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, had been forced to temporarily abandon their efforts to set a timeline for troop withdrawal after failing to get enough Republicans to join the effort.

That defeat drew widespread dissatisfaction from antiwar activists and the party base, even as Reid and his counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, vowed to return this summer with one vote after another as they continue to press the Bush administration to start bringing troops home.

But if the numbers showed the beginning of the end of the honeymoon for Democrats, who regained control of Congress last fall, the Republicans must be sweating.

Republicans are increasingly agitated about the direction of the war under President Bush, and those in the Senate have made no secret they are not looking forward to Reid's strategy of putting Iraq votes forward over and over .

Republicans are trying to stand by Bush's decision for a troop surge and give it a chance to succeed, even as polls and reality in Iraq are not in their favor. Having to go on record continuing to support the policy is troubling to some.

Americans have stopped supporting the war, and Republicans face a summer of more bad news. Bush has said the fighting is likely to intensify, and May ended as one of the worst months for military deaths since the invasion.

Reid and Pelosi have said they plan to take up Iraq again shortly, with the Senate expecting to focus on a series of amendments to the 2008 defense bill this month.

In the Senate, proposals to withdraw troops, reconsider the president's authorization to go to war and ensure troop readiness are all expected to be on the table as preliminary discussions get under way next week.

Sen. Carl Levin, Mich., the Democratic chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has said he plans to put forward an amendment on troop withdrawal. Other senators have drafted legislation to put in place the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, which lays out steps for scaling back the troops.

The renewed legislative activity on Iraq will likely be on the floor of the chambers as Bush, by July, is required to report on the Iraqi government's progress toward benchmarks intended to measure its ability to form a stable political and military structure.

By September, the commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is expected to report on the results of the troop surge, a pivotal point for many Republicans, including Nevada House members Jon Porter and Dean Heller.

Reid's office dismissed the public opinion polls that showed approval for the Democratic Congress had fallen from 54 percent in April to 44 percent.

"Polls are snapshots in time . They go up and down," Reid spokesman Jon Summers said. "Sen . Reid is focused on building on the results this Congress has already achieved and changing course in Iraq."

But congressional scholar Norm Ornstein at the American Enterprise Institute said Democrats will likely continue to suffer hits until September, when there will most likely be the clearest debate on the next steps in the war.

"They're just going to have to go through this for a while," he said. "A lot of their members were complacent - this has got to jolt them a little bit."