Posted on 01/22/2004 11:06:50 AM PST by jgrubbs
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The Senate gave President Bush and his Republican allies a victory today by approving an $820 billion spending bill covering more than a dozen federal departments and agencies in the fiscal year that began almost four months ago.
The vote was 65 to 28. But that vote was anticlimactic, in a sense, because minutes earlier the chamber had voted, 61-32, to end a delay, or filibuster, that had blocked the measure. The 61 votes were one more than needed to defeat the filibuster.
The bill, approved by the House weeks ago, was a conspicuous item of unfinished Senate business over the holiday recess. On Tuesday, Senate Republicans fell 12 votes short of the 60 needed to block the filibuster, when only 48 senators voted to cut off debate.
"Our desire isn't to kill this bill," Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, the minority leader, told reporters after the Tuesday vote. "Our desire is to give them a chance to fix it."
Republicans said, in effect, that there was nothing to fix. "We are not changing this bill, period," said Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate.
Mr. Daschle conceded after Tuesday's roll call that he did not expect the filibuster to endure and that final passage would come before February. In anticipation of today's vote, a number of Democrats said they had made their point.
Democrats objected to provisions they said will allow the Bush administration to threaten the overtime pay of millions of workers; relax media ownership rules; and delay a requirement that supermarket meat and produce carry labels identifying them by country of origin. The meatpacking industry and the major organization representing cattlemen oppose the labels.
"Take it or leave it," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said angrily today in describing the Republicans' attitude. "This is one senator who's going to leave it because of what it will do to working families and women and veterans of this country."
Republicans had said that if Democrats continued to block the $820 billion bill (which includes Social Security and Medicare), then they would push through a resolution financing the affected departments and agencies at last year's levels.
That could have had serious repercussions, not only in the vast federal bureaucracy but for individual lawmakers, many of whom have to run this year.
Line-by-line scrutiny of huge spending bills almost invariably turns up instances of special-interest items, some with civic benefits, virtually all meant to burnish the images of the legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, with their local constituents.
Three Republican senators, Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado and John S. McCain of Arizona, sided with the Democrats on Tuesday. Mr. McCain had complained that the bill was studded with special-interest, pork-barrel spending. "It's hard to pick the ugliest pig in this sty," he said.
Ugly or not, the bill cleared the Senate this afternoon. Many of the lawmakers have acknowledged that the election season will require much of their attention and energy. And before long, President Bush will send them his proposed budget for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
You're joking, right?
The reason Democrats spend so much is because they 'buy their votes'
Again, you're joking, right? The Republicans don't buy their votes, eh?
Is that what you want?
You do have a point there.
You say it like it's a bad thing.
My favorite is the "millions" for the "no child left behind" to make sure kids can read by middle school, and now the new millions for the new "program" to help the middle school and high school students that the "no child left behind" didn't help.
Maybe he's waiting for his advisers to tell him that public schools are a failure--always have been, always will.
Since sometime around three generations ago. Changing the rules at this point is going to drive even more people in the party to stay at home on election day. This has to be one of the stupidest moves, politically, that the GOP has made lately.
Kennedy misses the point, as usual, but at least he didn't support the additonal spending (for the wrong reasons, of course).
That is good news.
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