WASHINGTON — The Senate gave President Bush a big win on Iraq Tuesday night as it passed a massive $555 billion spending bill combining funding for 14 Cabinet departments with $70 billion for U.S. military operations there and in Afghanistan.
But Bush’s GOP allies were divided over whether the omnibus appropriations bill represented a win for the party in a months-long battle with Democrats over domestic agency budgets.
In rapid succession, the Senate cast two votes to approve the hybrid spending bill. By a 70-25 vote, the Senate approved the Iraq and Afghanistan war funds — without restrictions that Democrats had insisted on for weeks.
Senators followed with a 76-17 vote to agree to a bundle of 11 annual appropriations bills funding domestic agencies and the foreign aid budget for the budget year that began Oct. 1.
The House is slated today to ready the entire package for Bush, though the vote will be only on the Iraq portion of the measure. That vote would cap a parliamentary dance choreographed to ease the overall package through a chamber split between Democratic opponents of the Iraq war and GOP foes of the domestic spending portion of the bill.
The result on domestic spending created a divide between Republicans who thought it was a good deal and those who said it was too expensive and full of pork-barrel spending.
The omnibus measure held to Bush’s “top line” for the one-third of the federal budget passed by Congress each year, but only through a combination of budget maneuvers that allowed Democrats to restore funding to budget accounts targeted by Bush and finance billions of dollars worth of lawmakers’ home-state projects.
Conservatives estimated the measure contained at least $28 billion in domestic spending above Bush’s budget, funded by a combination of “emergency” spending, transfers from defense and budget gimmicks.
The bill includes $50 million for security at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and a one-year moratorium on expanding the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site.
It also prevents the Bureau of Land Management from issuing leases, final rules or regulations for commercial-scale leasing of oil shale in 2008.
Sen Wayne Allard, R-Colo., voted against the spending bill because of the restrictions on oil shale, while Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., supported the bill and the oil shale restrictions, which he said would ensure a “thoughtful and deliberative approach” to development.
