Senate close to approving supplemental funding bill
Bush has threatened to veto the legislation if the final version exceeds his $94.5 billion request.
The Senate invoked cloture Tuesday on a nearly $109 billion fiscal 2006 emergency supplemental for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and hurricane relief.
The vote was 92-4, with a few lonely protest votes over what some conservatives see as excessive spending. The measure is headed for final passage by Wednesday and will go to conference with a House version that would cost about $17 billion less.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, issued a joint statement Tuesday characterizing the Senate bill as a "special interest shopping cart."
President Bush has threatened to veto any bill above his revised $94.5 billion request -- which includes additional funds for avian flu preparedness. That veto threat is backed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and 34 other GOP senators.
Republican leaders have narrowed the list of amendments to fewer than 10, including some from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. He offered an amendment eliminating a provision requiring the Navy to reimburse Northrop Grumman Corp. for "business disruption" costs incurred at their Mississippi and Louisiana shipyards. Critics label the move a "corporate welfare bailout" that could cost up to $500 million.
Estimates of government liability are as low as $150 million, however, and Senate Appropriations Chairman Thad Cochran's aides say the provision could save money in the long run by accelerating ship delivery while Northrop resolves its insurance claims in court.
After the cloture vote, the Senate adopted an amendment by voice vote adding $2.2 billon to rebuild and strengthen New Orleans levees and other flood projects in California, Hawaii, Texas and Pennsylvania. Bush requested funds only for Louisiana, and urged that they be offset by a $2.2 billion reduction in Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief accounts.
The Senate amendment is not offset, but the funds would be subject to White House approval before being spent.
The Senate rejected, 59-40, an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to strike $6 million for Hawaiian sugarcane growers, as Cochran and other Republican appropriators joined forces with Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, and other Democrats.
McCain argued that the islands' sugarcane crops "weren't anywhere near the path of the 2005 hurricanes." The funds would go to Hawaii's last two surviving sugar plantations, which Inouye has helped as recently as 2004 in the fiscal 2005 emergency supplemental for Florida's hurricanes that year.
Inouye argued that his state recently suffered devastating floods and that $6 million was not nearly enough to compensate the sugar companies for their losses. The bill has $3.9 billion for agriculture relief, including $15 million for ewe lamb replacement and $400,000 for the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers cooperative.