Republican Sens. Phil Gramm of Texas and John McCain of Arizona have renewed their fight with Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Ark., over fiscal 2001 spending levels, acting last week to block Senate consideration of the $288 billion Defense conference report-even as the House passed it Wednesday by an overwhelming vote of 367-58.
Gramm and Stevens engaged in a heated exchange over the matter during a Senate vote Thursday afternoon, their raised voices audible from the gallery above. Stevens, who also chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, later said, "I told him we're not going to let him kill the bill."
Gramm and McCain oppose what they consider "pork" projects in the bill, as well as the $1.8 billion in emergency fiscal 2000 supplemental money for operations and maintenance it includes-on top of the emergency Defense funding in the separate, free-standing fiscal 2000 supplemental the president signed into law last week.
Specifically, the Defense bill contains $1.1 billion in emergency fiscal 2000 money for the overseas contingency operations transfer fund-which came out of that fund's fiscal 2001 appropriations-and another $679 million in fiscal 2000 emergency money for Navy personnel, operations and maintenance, and defense healthcare accounts.
A spokesman for House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., said House and Senate conferees funded Defense "at a level that was supported by 367 members of the House, and no doubt will be supported by an equal percentage of the Senate-and is supported by the American people."
In addition, Gramm and McCain objected because Stevens, who chaired the conference committee, was unable to get language into the conference report to reverse $6 billion in fiscal 2001 outlay savings Stevens had added to the fiscal 2000 supplemental conference report.
Gramm, a senior member of the Budget Committee, threatened to derail Senate passage of the fiscal 2000 supplemental when it came to the floor in late June over three savings provisions, which he called budgetary gimmicks that ran counter to an agreement he had reached with Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., in writing the fiscal 2001 budget resolution.
To mollify Gramm, Stevens promised "that on the first available vehicle to the Appropriations Committee we will rescind the action that is in this bill" to shift into fiscal 2000 the payment of $2.4 billion in Supplemental Security Income benefits and $1.9 billion in veterans compensation, and transfer $2 billion in outlays from defense to non-defense accounts.
But Stevens said that House Defense conferees refused to accept his language to reverse those shifts. In a full committee markup Wednesday, Stevens added similar language to the fiscal 2001 Energy and Water appropriations bill.
But Domenici said Thursday he doubts that House conferees on his bill would accept that language to reverse the $6 billion in savings those three provisions provide.
Domenici said he supports using the savings provisions that Gramm wants reversed, adding: "I'm going to vote for the practical thing. If we don't do it, we'll just have to find [the savings] somewhere else. We've got to spend more money than the budget resolution" to finish the fiscal 2001 appropriations cycle on time. The budget resolution capped total fiscal 2001 spending at $600.3 billion.
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