Although a divided Congress in an election year may be a model of dysfunction, lawmakers this week are set to demonstrate how easily they can agree when their political interests align.

The House likely will approve a Senate-passed bill to strengthen rules against insider trading by members of Congress and executive-branch officials. On Monday, the Senate is expected to pass a long-term Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that spent years stalled over labor issues.

However, not everything may go as smoothly. House Republican leaders’ efforts to push their massive transportation package face internal opposition as well as skepticism from Democrats and Senate Republicans.

Meanwhile, conferees wrestling with financing the payroll-tax-holiday package speed toward a soft Feb. 17 deadline established to give both chambers time to act before the current package’s Feb. 29 expiration. Anxiety is building that Congress is heading for another eleventh-hour showdown.

But the STOCK Act gets marquee billing this week, even as Capitol Hill insiders privately complain that it addresses a nonexistent problem and merely bolsters standing law.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who promised to act “with dispatch” on the bill, said on Friday that House Republicans will first “strengthen it.”

The House also takes up a variation of the line-item veto this week. Sought by every president since Richard Nixon, the bill, backed by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., would allow presidents to strike specific provisions of appropriations bills, with congressional approval.

The Senate takes up the conference report on a four-year reauthorization of the FAA, which the House approved on Friday. Labor’s displeasure with changes to unionizing rules aside, passage is expected. Then the Senate will likely move to a surface-transportation reauthorization bill, which Senate leaders think they can pass. However, House Republicans’ efforts to attach provisions regarding energy policy, such as one to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, make it unlikely that a final deal will be reached soon.

Senate Republicans will huddle on Wednesday for an extra day of discussions that they failed to complete during a retreat last month. With their eye on winning Senate control by running against President Obama, they hope to avoid handing him ammunition on the campaign trail. But some rank-and-file members want to draw sharper distinctions with him on issues that leadership believes are political liabilities.

Despite environmental opposition, the Obama administration has approved a controversial oil-sands pipeline.

No, not the Keystone XL pipeline that Washington has been fighting over for months. More than two years ago, on Aug. 20, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton approved a 1,000-mile pipeline that has the capacity to send 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada’s oil sands to Wisconsin. That pipeline is owned by the Canadian company Enbridge and began operating in October 2010.

Sound familiar? The Keystone XL pipeline, as proposed by another Canadian company, TransCanada, would send up to 700,000 barrels of oil a day 1,700 miles from Hardisty, Alberta—the same town where the Enbridge pipeline known as the Alberta Clipper originates—to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast.

“It speaks to the fact that the Keystone XL debate has been infused with presidential politics, partisan politics, and has not had enough to do with the discussion of how do we truly become energy self-reliant,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Udall, like several senators approached by National Journal Daily on Thursday, didn’t know about the Clipper oil-sands pipeline before being prompted about it.

“I think there is a legitimate argument that it’s in the national interest to build the pipeline,” said Udall, adding that it’s important that the administration work with Nebraska to find the right route before approving the Keystone project. President Obama rejected a permit for Keystone XL last month, arguing that the 60-day deadline for a decision imposed by congressional Republicans did not allow enough time to study alternate routes around a sensitive ecosystem in Nebraska.

“The same administration approved that one?” said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who also didn’t know that the Obama administration had backed the Enbridge project. “Then why aren’t they approving this one? I don’t know.”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans a hearing on Friday to hear testimony from administration officials and other stakeholders involved in the Keystone XL pipeline review process. The hearing probably won’t advance the debate much because Congress is gridlocked over how to respond to Obama’s decision.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., who also didn’t know about the Clipper pipeline, said on Thursday that “the issue on this one largely is Nebraska.”

Lobbyists and other experts following the Keystone debate argue, however, that most of the environmental opposition to Keystone is not really about Nebraska; in fact, numerous pipelines already cross all parts of the state, including environmentally sensitive areas. Environmentalists are primarily concerned about the effect that producing oil from the carbon-rich tar sands could have on climate change and how the pipeline project fits with America’s commitment to clean energy.

“There was a focused campaign around Clipper,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s International Program, who worked against the Enbridge pipeline too. “What we see now with Keystone XL is that concerns and awareness about tar-sands expansion and pipelines have grown exponentially in the United States.”

On the other side of the fight, proponents of Keystone say that politics has turned what is normally a routine approval process on its head.

“A lot of folks in the industry have been amused by the fact that the Clipper project went through without much fanfare but that Keystone XL has generated an ‘all hands on deck from liberal Hollywood’ moment,” said Stephen Brown, a top lobbyist for the refiner Tesoro. “I think the disconnect just underscores how the Keystone pipeline has been hijacked by the politics of the time rather than decided on the merits of the project itself.”

When Clinton approved the Clipper permit, she outlined the national-security, economic, and environmental reasons why the administration supported the pipeline.

The State Department said at the time that the Clipper pipeline would increase “the diversity of available supplies among the United States’ worldwide crude-oil sources in a time of considerable political tension in other major oil-producing countries and regions.”

On the economic benefits, the State Department said that approval of the pipeline would send “a positive economic signal, in a difficult economic period, about the future reliability and availability of a portion of United States’ energy imports, and in the immediate term, this shovel-ready project will provide construction jobs for workers in the United States.”

These are the same arguments that proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, led by congressional Republicans, cite as reason to approve that project without delay.

House Democrats led by Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen of Maryland believed on Tuesday night they’d found a way to tiptoe out of a political corner Republicans are hoping to paint them into.

Under the language of the GOP bill scheduled for action under Wednesday’s suspension calendar, a pay freeze that has been in place for federal workers since 2010 would continue beyond this December to the end of 2013, while the bill would also prevent members of Congress from getting a pay increase.

But House Democrats say the legislation, sponsored by Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., and backed by GOP leaders, is intended to embarrass lawmakers who want to vote against lengthening the current pay freeze for nonmilitary federal workers.

Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., on Tuesday sarcastically acknowledged the GOP maneuver was “clever,” because it essentially would require members who don’t want to see the pay of federal employees frozen longer to vote against extending the pay freeze for themselves.

“It includes a freeze of our own salary. Very clever. So it will be perceived [that] if you are voting against the bill, you are voting to raise your own salary,” Hoyer said. Both Hoyer and Van Hollen represent Washington-area districts that are homes to thousands of federal employees.

Democrats announced a solution on Tuesday night: Van Hollen said he is introducing a separate, alternative bill “designed to allow members to support a congressional pay freeze, without further penalizing federal employees.”

In a letter to fellow House Democrats, Van Hollen further explained: “Federal employees have seen no cost-of-living adjustment for two years. For the [fiscal] 2013 budget, President Obama has proposed a very modest 0.5 percent [COLA]—which falls well short of a full COLA of 1.7 percent.... House Republicans want to block even this small adjustment.”

“The Republicans are once again trying to make federal employees scapegoats for the slow economy resulting from Bush economic policies,” Van Hollen wrote. “Please join me in opposing the bill to penalize federal employees and in cosponsoring legislation to freeze Congressional pay in [fiscal] 2013.”

In an interview, Van Hollen said he would be asking Republicans who control the House floor schedule to add his bill to Wednesday’s suspension calendar so it is considered, side-by-side, with the Republican bill, and members’ positions can be made clear.

Democrats said they had not yet received word from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., on whether Van Hollen’s bill would be given expedited consideration Wednesday on the House floor, to go along with the Republican bill.

Cantor’s office did not respond to that question from National Journal Daily by presstime on Tuesday night.

Earlier, Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon had said of the GOP bill: “Federal employees earn higher salaries than their counterparts in the private sector, and with record deficits, we must cut spending and not use hard-earned taxpayer dollars to give government bureaucrats and members of Congress a raise.”

Republicans have been seizing on a Congressional Budget Office report released on Monday showing the federal government paid 16 percent more in total compensation than the private sector and paid 2 percent more in total wages between 2005 and 2010 than it would have if average wages had been comparable with those in the private sector.

But there are wide differences among federal workers with varied education levels. For instance, federal workers with a professional degree or doctorate earned about 23 percent less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts.

Because the Republican majority has placed Duffy’s legislation on Wednesday’s suspension calendar, there will be no amendments to the bill allowed, and two-thirds of those members present for the vote must agree for it to pass.

And although Republicans hold 242 of the 433 currently occupied seats in the House, they do not control two-thirds of them. That means some Democratic support will be needed—that is, if all the members show up to vote.

But to hear Hoyer describe it, what’s at issue for the GOP is not so much whether the bill passes.

Rather, he suggests congressional Republicans and the National Republican Congressional Committee are ready to rev up attacks ads against Democrats who vote against the measure, as a vote they have cast against blocking pay increases the pay for themselves. Democrats hope the Van Hollen bill—even if it doesn’t pass—might help defang those attacks.

Republican and Democratic conferees alike are calling for more urgency in reaching a deal by the end of next month for a yearlong extension of the payroll-tax holiday and unemployment benefits and preventing a cut in reimbursement rates for Medicare doctors.

But the resurrection of an effort this week by House Republicans to target federal workers’ pay as part of the fight over how to pay for the $160 billion package has emerged as yet another obstacle to any agreement.

Washington-area lawmakers—including Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee and a member of the House-Senate Conference Committee negotiating the package—are determined to keep proposals that eye federal workers’ pay or benefits from being included.

But on Wednesday, the same day conferees are to gather for their second public session, the House has scheduled a floor vote on a bill that would extend a freeze now in place through December on the salaries of nonmilitary federal employees for another year, through 2013.

“Republicans refuse to ask the very wealthy to share in the effort and instead insist on using federal employees as a scapegoat,” said Van Hollen, whose district is home to thousands of federal workers.

The pay-freeze bill, sponsored by freshman Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., comes even though President Obama intends to propose in his upcoming budget a 0.5 percent salary increase next year for federal civilian workers, who have seen their salaries frozen since 2010.

In a statement on Monday, Duffy emphasized that members of Congress also would continue to see their pay frozen under his bill. But, he added, “While private-sector workers face the squeeze, and millions of families continue searching for work, the idea of asking that their hard-earned tax dollars go to fund a pay raise for government employees is just not right.”

Meanwhile, other Republicans sought to justify such a move by citing a Congressional Budget Office report released on Monday that shows the federal government pays 16 percent more in total compensation than the private sector.

Upon closer inspection, however, it is uncertain whether the report provides clear ammunition for Republicans to keep federal-worker salaries frozen. For example, the congressional auditors found that in terms of pay, the federal government paid 2 percent more in total wages between 2005 and 2010 than it would have if average wages had been comparable with those in the private sector. But there are wide differences among federal workers with varied education levels. For instance, federal workers with a professional degree or doctorate earned about 23 percent less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts.

In terms of total compensation—the sum of wages and benefits—CBO found federal civilian employees with no more than a high school education averaged 36 percent higher total compensation than similar private-sector employees. But federal employees with a professional degree or doctorate received on average 18 percent less in total compensation than their private-sector counterparts.

Even so, Wednesday’s House vote on extending the federal employee pay freeze through 2013 is being placed on the “suspension calendar,” meaning no amendments can be offered, debate will be limited, and two-thirds of those members present must agree for it to pass.

Republicans appear to be daring Democrats to vote against it.

Against such maneuvering, House-Senate conferees seeking to work out the particulars of extending the payroll-tax holiday and the other components of the package before they expire at the end of February are voicing similar calls for a need to work swiftly.

Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., even said on Monday that he was concerned about the lack of “a sense of urgency” in the talks.

“We do have a time deadline here,” Kyl told reporters.

But one side’s extraneous issue may not be the other’s. For instance, Kyl cited Democratic demands for provisions like a surtax on incomes of more than a million dollars a year—a position both sides recognize Republicans will not accept—as the type of thing the conferees need to quickly move past. At the same time, Kyl did not embrace or rule out a push by Republicans to include language to force construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, saying “there are certainly Republicans who would like to see Keystone 2, or whatever you want to call it, as part of this.”