It’s a battle royal between the Senate, the House, GOPers in the Senate and the House and the White House. And, as the New York Times notes, it could even end in President George Bush casting his first veto:
The Senate approved a $109 billion measure on Thursday to pay for the war in Iraq and Gulf Coast hurricane recovery, ignoring a veto threat by President Bush and an increasingly hard line against spending by House Republicans.
In a 77-to-21 vote, the Senate approved the legislation, which would provide almost $71 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and foreign aid, $29 billion for hurricane relief, $4 billion for farm assistance, $2.5 billion for preparations for a potential flu pandemic and $2.5 billion for border enforcement and port security.
“It is very important to the protection of the security interests of the people of the United States,” said Senator Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, who as chairman of the Appropriations Committee was the chief author of the measure.
But the Senate bill, which exceeds Mr. Bush’s ceiling by about $14 billion, sets up a clash with the White House and the House, which earlier this year approved about $17 billion less than the Senate and is vowing not to budge.
So the battle lines, shaped by fiscal concerns and the fact that it is an election year, are drawn:
“The House will not take up an emergency supplemental spending bill for Katrina and the war in Iraq that spends $1 more than what the president asked for, period,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, told reporters on Thursday.
Later in the day, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois declared the Senate bill “dead on arrival,” one of the harshest public characterizations in recent memory of legislation from his fellow Republicans in the Senate.
“The House has no intention of joining in a spending spree at the expense of American taxpayers,” Mr. Hastert said in a statement.
It’ll be interested to see how this is spun during the campaign. Clearly, it isn’t only Democrats who are bucking the White House. Constituent pressures are particularly strong during an election year — especially one where GOP incumbents in particular want to do everything possible to please the voters, given low poll numbers. In recent days, some analysts have said that the Senate may be easier to slip into Democratic hands than the House.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.