Senate Fattens Up Spending Bill

The Senate on Wednesday neared approval of a $109-billion spending bill to fund the Iraq war and hurricane relief efforts, loading it up with billions of extra dollars for projects around the country -- including $37 million to rebuild levees in California.

The Senate is expected to vote on the measure today, setting up a confrontation with President Bush, who has threatened to veto any bill that tops the $92-billion version passed by the House in March.

Deficit-cutters had fought to keep extra spending from being tacked onto the measure, which mostly would cover ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They expressed hope that most of the extra funding would be removed during negotiations with the House on a joint bill.

“I hope it gets stripped out, but I’d be surprised,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading voice for reforming the practice of “earmarks” -- where lawmakers add programs that benefit specific districts to often unrelated bills.

McCain said he could not predict whether the president would carry through with his veto threat; during his more than five years as president, Bush has never vetoed a bill.

“We have never been down this path before with this administration, with a substantial, firm veto threat,” McCain said.

Spending issues divide Republicans on Capitol Hill into traditionalists, who cherish their constitutional power of the purse, and deficit hawks, who deplore federal spending beyond a bare minimum.

The latter were represented on the Senate floor this week by freshman Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who led a largely futile campaign to cut unrelated spending from the bill.

“In emergency legislation, we have a lot of things that really aren’t emergencies, and I think we really ought to as a body look at that and use self-discipline,” Coburn said.

But California’s two Democratic senators argued that failing to repair weakened levees near Sacramento could cause a Katrina-like emergency in Northern California.

“The bottom line is that human life and property hangs in the balance, based on the sustainability of these levees,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said. “The land is below water level, sometimes as much as 20 feet below. Therefore, a levee break can bring catastrophe.”

Coburn countered that if the levees qualified as an emergency, why did California already ask for and receive, by his count, $753 million in other earmarks this year?

“If Sacramento is at risk from a cataclysmic flood, the California delegation should have fixed the levee before securing $3.6 million for grape research and other pork projects,” Coburn spokesman John Hart said. “Senators were elected to make hard choices between levee construction and grape research.”

Nonetheless, Coburn withdrew his challenge to the levee measure, saying he did not have the votes to strip it from the bill.

If the bill passes and becomes law, the $37 million for California’s levees includes $23.3 million to prevent riverbank erosion in and around Sacramento.