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.
The 1996 GOP platform called for abolishing the Department of Education and ending "federal meddling in schools.", it also called for eliminating the departments of Commerce, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The $56 billion in total discretionary funding for federal education is an all-time high. Under President Bush, in just three years the Education Department’s overall funding will have increased by $13.8 billion.
Federal education spending has increased by 118 percent from 1996 (the first fiscal year under a Republican majority in Congress) to 2002. The President’s FY 2004 builds on that increase.
The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. The Texas redistricting plan drawn up by the GOP stands.
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money".
In a famous incident in 1854, President Franklin Pierce courageously vetoed an extremely popular bill intended to help the mentally ill saying: "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity." To approve such spending, he argued, "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded." Grover Cleveland, the king of the veto, rejected hundreds of congressional spending bills during his two terms as president in the late 1800s, because, as he often wrote: "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."
Were Jefferson, Madison, Crockett, Pierce, and Cleveland merely hardhearted and uncaring penny pinchers, as their critics have often charged? Were they unsympathetic toward fire victims, the mentally ill, widows, or impoverished refugees? Of course not. They were honor bound to uphold the Constitution. They perceived - we now know correctly - that once the government genie was out of the bottle, it would be impossible to get it back in.
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