Treasury-Postal bill still controversial

Back in session today, the House plans to kick off what Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, predicted will be a "tough July," with what promises to be another difficult vote on the rule for the FY99 Treasury-Postal appropriations bill--which went down to defeat before the July 4th recess.

Armey said the Treasury-Postal rule will only protect from points of order language to deny members their annual cost-of-living increase and an amendment concerning the United Parcel Service by Rep. Anne Northup, R-Ky. But unlike the first rule, Armey said the new rule will not protect language to include prescription contraceptives among federal employees' health benefits, nor deem more funds to address the looming year 2000 computer problem as emergency spending--both issues that contributed to defeat of the rule last month.

Armey said the House will take up the fiscal 1999 Treasury-Postal and VA-HUD appropriations bills Thursday. On the Interior appropriations bill, scheduled for consideration next week, Armey confirmed the rule will strike the funds for the National Endowment for the Arts restored by GOP moderates and Democrats at the full committee level, and then allow Rep. Nancy Johnson, R- Conn., to offer an amendment on the floor to restore it. And on the Foreign Operations appropriations bill, Armey said regardless of what happens in committee, there will be a floor vote on a provision to prohibit international family planning groups that receive U.S. funds from lobbying foreign governments on abortion.

Meanwhile, the Senate Appropriations Committee today unanimously approved a fiscal 1999 Transportation appropriations bill after Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, requested that debate over the more contentious aspects of the bill be reserved for the floor. Most notably, Stevens requested that debate over a controversial labor provision inserted into the bill by the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee be confined to the floor. Stevens said he will not support the provision when it is debated there.

Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., warned that allowing the provision to linger could jeopardize the entire bill. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., offered, but then withdrew, an amendment dealing with the Transportation Department's classification of certain agricultural products as hazardous substances subject to federal hazmat transport regulations. Burns argued that it would cost farmers "millions of dollars" if they were forced to comply with those federal rules.