News
Feb 09 2007
Senate Debates $463.5B Spending Bill
Democrats controlling the Senate are pushing through a huge spending bill funding 13 Cabinet agencies as they wrap up the unfinished budget mess inherited from Republicans.
The $463.5 billion measure debated Thursday would pay for about one-sixth of the budget, combining nine spending bills that failed to pass Congress last year under GOP control.
The bill enjoys bipartisan support it passed the House last week by a 2-1 margin but Republicans are angry that Democrats are pushing it through without giving them a crack at amending the bill.
While protesting hardball tactics by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Republicans admit he has them boxed in because any attempt to filibuster the bill would invite charges that Republicans were shutting down the government when a stopgap measure expires next week.
A vote to close debate is slated for Tuesday, and Democrats are confident they will prevail.
The budgeting work was supposed to have been completed months ago, but Republicans didn't want to make some tough choices before the election and made no serious effort to complete the work after it.
The bill sticks within spending limits set by Bush, though Democrats created wiggle room through maneuvers such as cutting $3 billion from his request to implement a 2005 round of military base closures and $3.5 billion in phantom savings from highway spending.
Most federal accounts will be frozen at 2006 levels. There are, however, scores of exceptions for agencies and programs that simply must have increases to avoid furloughs and hiring freezes, or cutting critical services such as housing assistance for more than 200,000 poor people.
Democrats shifted the money to programs popular in both parties such as education, veterans, health research and grants to state and local law enforcement agencies.
President Bush has signaled he will sign the budget bill.
But Republicans blasted the decision to cut base-closing funds, saying it would harm communities that need the money to prepare closed bases for other uses and would slow the redeployment of 12,000 troops stationed in Germany and South Korea to domestic bases such as Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.
"Democrats now have said they intend to cut funding for facilities for our troops returning home from overseas," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. "The Democrats need to get their priorities straight."
Democrats countered that they will restore the base-closing cuts in a few months when advancing Bush's $100 billion request for additional Iraq war funding. Efforts to pass the military base measure fell apart in December after Senate GOP conservatives blocked House-Senate negotiations.
Among the resulting trade-offs were cuts to Bush's budget requests for NASA and foreign aid.
Community development block grants were frozen at current levels, as was aid for the Amtrak railroad. Still, advocates for those programs portrayed it as a victory of sorts in comparison with the budget Bush submitted a year ago.
The amount intended to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis overseas would grow by $1.3 billion, to $4.5 billion. That would pay for the president's $225 million initiative to fight malaria and increase the U.S. contribution to $724 million for a global fund for those diseases.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., the Senate's sole physician, blasted Democrats for failing to fund a $30 million program he authored to test newborns for the AIDS virus. A spokesman for Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said lawmakers put the money elsewhere because no states have yet met the criteria to be eligible to receive it.
The beneficiaries would include the National Institutes of Health, which would receive a $620 million budget hike, about 2 percent. The FBI, facing hiring curbs, would get a $200 million increase in its $6 billion budget.
The maximum annual Pell Grant for lower-income college students would increase by $260 to $4,310 the first increase since 2003.
The bill is also free of congressional "earmarks" the projects lawmakers like to slip into spending bills, such as grants for local governments, homestate universities, hospitals and roads. Such projects exploded in number under Republican control of Congress over the last 12 years.
Congress earned a black eye over mandating project-specific appropriations when former Republican Rep. Randy Cunningham of California admitted taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for earmarking projects for defense contractors. Cunningham is now serving an eight-year federal prison sentence.
Little of Thursday's debate concerned the bill itself. Instead, Republicans focused on Reid's tough tactics. Despite their failures last year and the need to meet a Feb. 15 deadline, Republicans said they deserved the right to offer changes.
They noted that in a comparable situation four years ago, when Republicans took back control of the Senate, a similar "omnibus" bill was debated for six days with more than two dozen votes on amendments.
The $463.5 billion measure debated Thursday would pay for about one-sixth of the budget, combining nine spending bills that failed to pass Congress last year under GOP control.
The bill enjoys bipartisan support it passed the House last week by a 2-1 margin but Republicans are angry that Democrats are pushing it through without giving them a crack at amending the bill.
While protesting hardball tactics by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Republicans admit he has them boxed in because any attempt to filibuster the bill would invite charges that Republicans were shutting down the government when a stopgap measure expires next week.
A vote to close debate is slated for Tuesday, and Democrats are confident they will prevail.
The budgeting work was supposed to have been completed months ago, but Republicans didn't want to make some tough choices before the election and made no serious effort to complete the work after it.
The bill sticks within spending limits set by Bush, though Democrats created wiggle room through maneuvers such as cutting $3 billion from his request to implement a 2005 round of military base closures and $3.5 billion in phantom savings from highway spending.
Most federal accounts will be frozen at 2006 levels. There are, however, scores of exceptions for agencies and programs that simply must have increases to avoid furloughs and hiring freezes, or cutting critical services such as housing assistance for more than 200,000 poor people.
Democrats shifted the money to programs popular in both parties such as education, veterans, health research and grants to state and local law enforcement agencies.
President Bush has signaled he will sign the budget bill.
But Republicans blasted the decision to cut base-closing funds, saying it would harm communities that need the money to prepare closed bases for other uses and would slow the redeployment of 12,000 troops stationed in Germany and South Korea to domestic bases such as Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.
"Democrats now have said they intend to cut funding for facilities for our troops returning home from overseas," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. "The Democrats need to get their priorities straight."
Democrats countered that they will restore the base-closing cuts in a few months when advancing Bush's $100 billion request for additional Iraq war funding. Efforts to pass the military base measure fell apart in December after Senate GOP conservatives blocked House-Senate negotiations.
Among the resulting trade-offs were cuts to Bush's budget requests for NASA and foreign aid.
Community development block grants were frozen at current levels, as was aid for the Amtrak railroad. Still, advocates for those programs portrayed it as a victory of sorts in comparison with the budget Bush submitted a year ago.
The amount intended to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis overseas would grow by $1.3 billion, to $4.5 billion. That would pay for the president's $225 million initiative to fight malaria and increase the U.S. contribution to $724 million for a global fund for those diseases.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., the Senate's sole physician, blasted Democrats for failing to fund a $30 million program he authored to test newborns for the AIDS virus. A spokesman for Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said lawmakers put the money elsewhere because no states have yet met the criteria to be eligible to receive it.
The beneficiaries would include the National Institutes of Health, which would receive a $620 million budget hike, about 2 percent. The FBI, facing hiring curbs, would get a $200 million increase in its $6 billion budget.
The maximum annual Pell Grant for lower-income college students would increase by $260 to $4,310 the first increase since 2003.
The bill is also free of congressional "earmarks" the projects lawmakers like to slip into spending bills, such as grants for local governments, homestate universities, hospitals and roads. Such projects exploded in number under Republican control of Congress over the last 12 years.
Congress earned a black eye over mandating project-specific appropriations when former Republican Rep. Randy Cunningham of California admitted taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for earmarking projects for defense contractors. Cunningham is now serving an eight-year federal prison sentence.
Little of Thursday's debate concerned the bill itself. Instead, Republicans focused on Reid's tough tactics. Despite their failures last year and the need to meet a Feb. 15 deadline, Republicans said they deserved the right to offer changes.
They noted that in a comparable situation four years ago, when Republicans took back control of the Senate, a similar "omnibus" bill was debated for six days with more than two dozen votes on amendments.
