Senate OKs funding for war, relief

Republican senators promised the president that they would sustain a veto.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
WASHINGTON -- The Senate passed a $109 billion bill Thursday to pay for war in Iraq and hurricane relief at home, knowing it would ignite a battle with the White House and House conservatives determined to shear it of $14 billion in election-year add-ons.
A veto threat imperils many of those provisions, which were added by lawmakers seeking additional funding for Gulf Coast relief and farmers as well as for border and port security.
The measure has grown much larger than President Bush says he is willing to accept, and difficult House-Senate talks loom over how to cut it back to his request.
House leaders promise to take a hard line in upcoming talks with the Senate.
"The House will not take up an emergency supplemental spending bill for Katrina and the war in Iraq that spends one dollar more than what the president asks for," said House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "Period."
The new funds would bring total spending on war-related costs since the September 2001 attacks to roughly $430 billion, according to calculations by the Congressional Research Service.
Appropriations for last year's hurricanes would now total about $96 billion.
The Senate measure passed by a 77-21 vote. It contains $65.7 billion for war operations and $28.9 billion for hurricane relief, including grants to states to build and repair housing, and $4 billion for levees and flood control projects in Louisiana.
Unrelated items
The bill attracted far more "no" votes than is typical for a measure benefiting U.S. troops overseas. But many Republicans -- including Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. -- said the measure's cost was simply too high and that too many items unrelated to the war or hurricane relief had been tacked on.
Bush's veto threat puts at risk a host of items not requested by the president, such as $4 billion in farm disaster aid, $1 billion in state grants and $1.1 billion in aid to the Gulf Coast seafood industry.
"Unfortunately, there are some here in Washington trying to load that bill up with unnecessary spending," Bush said. "This bill is for emergency spending, and it should be limited to emergency measures."
The tough talk came as the House overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at boosting security at U.S. ports; one of the Senate's add-ons would boost port security funding by $648 million. Another would provide $1.9 billion to secure U.S. borders and waters.
The upcoming House-Senate talks are certain to reduce the tally for hurricane aid, but lawmakers may give the Pentagon funding greater scrutiny as well. Negotiators are likely to be tempted to use $10 billion-plus for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster fund as a kind of piggy bank to fund projects not requested by Bush.
The Senate bill reflects the freewheeling nature of the body, where it takes just a few Republicans to cross party lines to join with Democrats for more spending. That happened again and again, both in the Appropriations Committee and on the floor.
Except for a single vote last week, to kill $15 million for seafood promotion obtained by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., conservatives failed to pare back the spending bill.
Battle
During the past two weeks, the bill was a battleground for fiscal discipline, pitting fiscal conservatives against members of the Appropriations Committee and the lawmakers who sponsored the special-interest provisions. In the end, the fiscal conservatives succeeded in stripping only one $15 million add-on from the bill.
At the same time, 35 Republican senators signed a letter to Bush promising to sustain his veto if he casts it. Frist and Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., were among them. Still, many of those 35 voted for the final bill.
"The bottom line is that I'm excited they're going to sustain the president's veto," said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., an earmark opponent. "They may disagree with individual items we're bringing up, but having their signature on that letter gives us a very strong hand going into conference" with the House.
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