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Will it be deal or no deal on spending bills?
Congress prepares two options simultaneously: a deal for the president and a veto override.
By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 13, 2007 edition
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Washington - With its approval ratings dropping into single digits, Congress heads into a wall of presidential veto threats this week, and neither side appears near the blinking point.
The standoff covers nearly all the spending bills for fiscal year 2008, as well as $50 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that Democrats plan to unveil this week.
President Bush has signed just five vetoes during his presidency. Last week, Congress easily overturned one of them: a $23.2 billion bill to authorize new water projects, including help for the Gulf Coast, still recovering from hurricane Katrina.
But Democrats aren't expecting that level of Republican support in the spending battles to come, which are already breaking down along partisan lines.
"The water bill is the exception. The other vetoes will be sustained," says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "Even in a lame-duck presidency, the veto power is one of the most influential any president has – that and war-making. This president is using both to the hilt to maintain his authority to the last day."
Democrats' strategy
Seven weeks into the new fiscal year, Democrats who control Congress are developing two options to get through the spending season: packaging a deal that Mr. Bush cannot refuse – or leveraging the votes needed to override his veto.
Last week, Congress passed the first two spending bills of the fiscal year, the FY 2008 Defense Appropriations and the Labor-Health, and Human Services (HHS) and Education bill. Bush has said he will sign the Defense bill, but has threatened to veto the Labor-HHS-Education bill because it spends $150.7 billion, which is $9.8 billion more than his budget calls for.
In a surprise procedural move, Senate Republicans blocked a bid by Democratic majority leader Harry Reid to combine the Labor-HHS-Education bill with the FY 2008 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill, which Bush said he wanted to sign by Veterans' Day.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Bush chided congressional leaders for letting the fiscal year end "without passing this bill they know our veterans need."
But congressional leaders had more success engineering the first veto override of the Bush presidency. Citing the importance of local projects, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle voted 79 to 14 in the Senate and 361 to 54 in the House to overturn Bush's veto.
However, GOP leaders noted that this bill authorized, but did not spend money, and that their members would stand firm with the White House on override votes on FY 2008 appropriations bills.
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