WASHINGTON (APUPI) In a new attempt to finally bring a rogue regime to heel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced today that they plan to diplomatically isolate the White House.

In response to an invitation from the president to come to the White House and discuss a troop funding bill, Senator Reid rejected it, saying “We won’t meet with preconditions. We hope that the road to peace lies down Pennsylvania Avenue, but we can’t trust this administration, and they don’t seem willing to negotiate on our obvious need to get the troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, and to lard the funding bill with things like spinach subsidies, despite the fact that we obviously couldn’t have passed it in the form we wanted without them.”

Speaker Pelosi agreed. “It’s one thing to meet with a peace-loving world leader like Bashar al-Assad, or President Ahmadinejad,” she said. “It’s another to meet with a theocratic warmonger like George Bush. If we dignify his illegitimate regime with a negotiation, how will we ever build international pressure against him, and end his imperialistic ambitions?”

Upon receiving the rejection of its invitation, the White House expressed its disappointment. “We are saddened by the decision of the Congressional majority to refuse to discuss this important issue,” said the White House Press Secretary. “The troops should be above politics like this.”

The leadership on the Hill was having none of it, however.

“We know from long experience that we can’t trust this lying government,” said Senator Reid. “The next step, if this doesn’t force them to recognize reality, will be economic sanctions. We’ll move to cut off funds to Halliburton, open up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to plunge oil prices, and cut off mountain bike exports to Crawford, Texas.”