Critics take aim at pending spending bills

The Senate took up the conference version of the fiscal 2010 Homeland Security Appropriations bill on Tuesday, giving some senators the chance to voice objections to provisions in the final package.

Nonetheless, the Senate was poised to give overwhelming approval to the spending bill that would provide the Homeland Security Department with about $42.8 billion in discretionary funds.

Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member George Voinovich, R-Ohio, protested that House and Senate conferees removed two immigration-related provisions from the bill. One would have permanently authorized use of the E-Verify system, which enables employers to verify the immigration status of new workers.

The other provision would have given employers the flexibility to use E-Verify to check the legal status of all workers on their payrolls, not just recent hires.

The conference agreement extends the E-Verify program for three years, which lawmakers contend will be enough time for Congress to take up legislation overhauling the nation's immigration laws.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., complained that the bill provides funding for construction of a National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kan. Under the bill, funds cannot be obligated until independent risk assessments are completed.

Tester said conferees should have required that the risk assessments be complete before allocating funding. He said the department could have instead requested funding in its fiscal 2011 budget.

More floor debate was expected Tuesday afternoon, with a likely focus on a provision that would let accused terrorists and other foreign prisoners held at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be brought to the United States for trial.

Meanwhile, the fiscal 2010 Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations bill, which is pending in the Senate, attracted a cadre of civil rights groups to Capitol Hill in protest of an amendment to the $64.9 billion measure that would require the 2010 census to ask about citizenship.

The groups argued at a news conference that the amendment offered by Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and Robert Bennett, R-Utah, would discourage participation in the census and undermine efforts for an accurate count.

Tuesday's event coincided with plans by the Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus to hold a rally against the proposal on Wednesday.

Terry Ao, director of census and voting programs for the Asian American Justice Center, stressed that to add the question to already printed materials would require the Census Bureau to "redo everything that they spent an entire decade doing, but do it in less than six months. If that sounds impossible, that's because it is."

Gloria Montano Greene, D.C. director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said the amendment would "suppress the involvement of Latinos" by using "scare tactics" and playing on unease over illegal immigration.

Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN, a progressive think tank, called that Vitter-Bennett proposal unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment -- which stopped the practice of counting slaves as three/fifths of a person for congressional apportionment -- requires that whole persons be counted for the census regardless of their citizenship.

"This is settled law," Rosenberg said.