PRESIDENT Bush has yet to issue his first veto. If an emergency spending bill currently under consideration in Washington emerges from Congress costing as much as the version passed last week by the Senate, Bush should get out his pen.

At $109 billion, the Senate version of the bill to pay for the Iraq war and Gulf Coast hurricane recovery is $17.1 billion more than the version passed by the House and $16.8 billion more than Bush's request.

The president said anything more than the $92.2 billion he sought would prompt his first veto. Did he mean it? Would he veto the measure if it's a penny over $92.2 billion, or would he accept an amount that's reasonably close to the mark? After the House and Senate reconcile their bills, Bush may well have to show whether he was bluffing.

The Senate apparently thinks he is. Members beat back attempts by fiscal conservatives to trim non-emergency, even wasteful, items. At one point the bill included $15 million for a seafood promotion campaign, prompting Sen. John McCain of Arizona to say he could save taxpayers' money simply by declaring "eat seafood" from the Senate floor.

That's about the only thing excised from the bill. Senators piled on a number of funding projects with faint ties to an emergency. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma decried the lack of scrutiny as the trough was filled. "How do we answer to the American public that we didn't try to trim any other type of spending as we spent $104 billion?" he said, even as the price tag went higher.

The stakes are high for Bush and his party, supposedly the champions of fiscal discipline. Their credibility on spending, already frayed, will unravel even more if a bloated spending bill is produced.