Newsflash: Bush vetoes health/education spending bill
President Bush on Tuesday vetoed a spending measure for health and education programs prized by congressional Democrats. He also signed a big increase in the Pentagon’s non-war budget.
The president’s action was announced on Air Force One as Bush flew to Indiana for a speech expected to criticize the Democratic-led Congress on its budget priorities.
More than any other spending bill, the $606 billion education and health measure defines the differences between Bush and majority Democrats. The House fell three votes short of winning a veto-proof margin as it sent the measure to Bush.
Rep. David Obey, the Democratic chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, pounced immediately on Bush’s veto.
“This is a bipartisan bill supported by over 50 Republicans,” Obey said. “There has been virtually no criticism of its contents. It is clear the only reason the president vetoed this bill is pure politics.”
Since winning re-election, Bush has sought to cut the labor, health and education measure below the prior year level. But lawmakers have rejected the cuts. The budget that Bush presented in February sought almost $4 billion in cuts to this year’s bill.
Democrats responded by adding $10 billion to Bush’s request for the 2008 bill. Democrats say spending increases for domestic programs are small compared with Bush’s pending war request totaling almost $200 billion.
Don Lambro looks at the earmarks larding up the legislation:
Despite the Democrats’ pledge to get control of their addiction to wasteful spending, their mountain of pork-barrel provisions has prevented Congress from passing its appropriations bills for fiscal year 2008. Exhibit A is a Labor, Health and Human Services and Education bill taken up by the Senate last week that was filled to the brim with pork (also known as earmarks). This “minibus” bill was engineered by Democrats attempting to draw just enough votes to make it veto-proof.
Last week, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., one of the stellar anti-pork warriors in Congress, said this about the bill: “The Democrats have made a joke of the ethics bill as they packed this ‘minibus’ with thousands of pet projects. They have shown their (so-called anti-pork) rules to be laughable and ineffective, as they continue to spend millions on secret earmarks and hide their pork from public scrutiny.”
All told, this spending package contained at least 2,200 earmarks worth more than $1 billion. Among them, a $1 million earmark for the Thomas Daschle Center for Public Service and Representative Democracy at South Dakota State University, named for the former Senate Democratic leader.
Democrats often go to great lengths to disguise what their earmarks are actually for, making their intentions sound far more important than they are. A $300,000 item that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., inserted into the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill for a museum called Exploratorium, which promotes “teacher recruitment, retention, and improvement initiative” (http://www.exploratorium.edu/).
But the Exploratorium’s Web site describes the museum as “a collage of hundreds of interactive exhibits in the areas of science, art, and human perception” Its mission is “to create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them.”
Pelosi’s pet project has been given more than $33 million in federal-funding earmarks and grants over the past six years. “Should federal taxpayers be subsidizing a wealthy city’s museum during a time of deficit spending?” asked the Senate Republican Conference’s Pork Report?
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Categories: George W. Bush
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Are they really cuts or just slowing the rate of increase?
True, but if the war is lost and hospitals/schools begin blowing up, pouring money down them isn’t going to made a difference.
Can he end “No Child left behind” while he is at it?
The Dems are always complaining about “Bush’s deficit,” but when you are running up a tab of purest pork to essentially buy votes, who is the real culprit?
And the excuse “well, he/she did it” (re: war budget vs. the domestic budget) stopped working for me in first grade. When are the Dems going to grow up?
This is great news about the Defense Appropriation we have been strangled by OSD direction barely able to operate at base level. Now maybe they will give us funding authority to establish our FY08 Service Contracts and other must pay requirements. We desperately need new aircraft in the Air Force our F-15 fleet is still grounded due to the Missouri ANG crash 2 weekends ago (which shuts down our flight operations at my base now that we are an F-15C/D/E base). A new class of Tankers (where the Boomer or Boom Operator site name)would be nice considering the KC-135R ranges from 1957 to 1964 except for the 59 KC-10s which began service in the early 80s.
Glad to see someone in Government has acted like an adult and kept the porkers from trying to bribe their constituents with their own tax dollars. I don’t agree with President Bush on his stance on illegal invasion, but I do support him fully on his focused approach in fight the GWOT and finally doing something about runaway Government spending.
Lets see, 2,200 earmarks worth 1 billion dollars, for democrats I’d say thats under control.
$ that’s all we are to them…
On November 13th, 2007 at 11:27 am, Mister P said:
Can he end “No Child left behind” while he is at it?
Tee, hee. In California the Teacher’s Union is so anti-No Child Left Behind, it’s hilarious. How DARE you base our pay on our performance?! Don’t you realize we are ABOVE reproach?! My kids are students in the public schools here. Believe me, things have taken an upswing since accountablility became required. The teacher’s union commercials complain about having to ‘teach to the test’. Well, isn’t that the point? Educate the kids first, propagandize later. And if my kids are forced to watch An Inconvenient Lie one more time in SCIENCE class, I will have to kick some serious teacher butt.
It’s really too bad that President Bush waited till now to get out his veto pen. If he’d been doing this all along, the dems wouldn’t have a leg to stand on (well they don’t now ‘cept to say “he’s just playing politics”).
I have one thing to say…vouchers.
Health and Education always has to play second fiddle to the war machine.
They need our help…
Bush is vetoing out of control spending bills during his final 18 months in office. Weeellll, isn’t that nice. If he had been vetoing out of control spending bills since January of 2000 and leading the republican party towards smaller government and reduced spending we all wouldn’t be sitting out here having to worry about Hillary as president with a democrat congress and a bleak future of high taxes, huge inflation, socialized medicine, high interest rates and a raging recession assuming that the Iranians or Chinese don’t nuke us, with technological capability that Bill supplied them, before things get too terrible.
Thanks George! Way to finally figure out what 50% of America sent you there to do. It’s a shame that it took nearly 7 years to figure out what any republican voter on the street could have told you November 8, 2000.
I G N O R E
H I M
T O O
On Hannity’s America Sunday night he hammered home how the Dems im congress were going to stop pork. Sean exposed them well. Now Pillosi GaWhore wants to cut their work week to 4 days.
HEY, DEMOCRATS!!! Are you paying attention?
Only Congress can spend money. Any excess in spending is solely the fault of those in Congress.
These people in congress claim to ’support the troops’ but then use the amount of funds needed to actually ’support the troops’ as an excuse to raid America for anything they want.
We were supposed to have 4 F-15’s fly over at Sunday’s NFL game but they are all grounded.
They are mostly about 30 years old anyway and need to be replaced. The military needs those bomb resistant vehicles 3 years ago.
The conservatives need to make the argument that the FEDERAL government’s job is to provide for the common defense. THAT IS WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR. The other stuff is unnecessary. If anyone else did what they were doing, they’d be thrown in jail for STEALING.
Go Bush. Point out how much they are wasting (no matter how much you wasted before). Americans are fed up with Congress’ spending. It is a winning issue politically.
There MUST be SOMETHING that can be cut from the budget ‘for the children’ who are going to have to pay for it eventually.
I agree. Bush could have (should have) easily vetoed everything with excess until Congress got it right. Plain and simple, this should have been done from the very outset, not just after your party squandered its power for perks.
If the American people actually were allowed to see what is actually contained in these spending bills, they would storm Washington. Unfortunately Republicans who want to prevent this nonsense don’t have the sound bite ability to expose this garbage to the degree that the democraps have to blast the mean, nasty, heartless Republicans & the President.
Imagine what could a million here and there be used for (children..lol) instead of politicians immortalizing themselves. (Tom Daschle. If the American people only knew the truth….
Deepdiver and ACHefty have it completely right.
Well, the he said/she said argument works better when you frame it as “Republicans spent a ton of pork without it getting vetoed.”
Republicans also lied by claiming they supported small government. But when push came to shove their districts all benefited from the federal government’s teat. At least with Democrats you don’t get the whiff of hypocrisy.
And everyone is perfectly reasonable to oppose this kind of federal spending. I don’t like it either. But electing Republicans isn’t going to help.
hatelibs…I kinda disagree
If the ONLY thing the president said for the next xx weeks until the press actually reported what he wanted reported was how much waste there was..I’m sure eventually, they would report it. The issue is with Pres. Bush, he somehow thinks if he says it once, it’s enough. We know that not to be adequate. Repetition will get the message out but it has to come from the President.
sausage troll, did you ever think we wouldn’t have “Health and Education” if it weren’t for the “war machine” you so despise?
conservativesRus
Do you actually believe that Bush gets the same coverage that the left does? I understand he is the President and I agree that he doesn’t pound the table enough or get his message out. But the left spews their nonsense almost completely unchallenged except for talk radio and places like this.
As Rush has always called the “media” the willing accomplicses for Democraps. I would call it the “disinformation wing” of the party.
We are making progress on issues like SCHIP and the Amnesty Bill but too many people only catch the sound bites and draw their conclusions. Sadly the majority of sound bites are anti-Bush. The news that’s fit to print or broadcast.
hatelibs…I agree that the mouthpiece is way biased in it’s message. A dem staffer sneezes it gets reported on page one, a conservative is out for a month with pneumonia and it’s page 9 material. But my point is - if the President wants the message out, he has to use what’s available and repeat, repeat, repeat and then say it again. Eventually, even Helen Thomas and David Gregory will a) drop dead, or b) report it.
Quite frankly the president should just veto any bill for education and health. Neither are Constitutional federal mandates. Both I think are the domain of the states.
Of course little details like constitutional authority and what it means is something completely lost on a very high percentage of voters.
Right out of the Hillary “buy their votes” paybook.
No child left behind has nothing to do with “performance”. It is about reducing the performance of the top performers and spending the teacher’s time on the poor performers. It is a common demoninator effect and helps dumb down America.
“Vouchers” - I guess I am still upset with Carter for vetoing the voucher bill. Imagine competition in the field of education. Conservatives should be either pushing for vouchers or the elimination of government schools. Instead we give low standards to our monopolies and worry about minor education bills. No wonder engineering jobs have left the country.
This one is aggregious, I read (I think in NRO) that it was submitted by Robert Byrd and Harry Reid. Neither of whom is a Senator from South Dakota.
I wonder if anyone bothered to ask SDSU if they wanted it…..
conservativesRus
“If the President wants the message out, he has to use what’s available and repeat, repeat, repeat and then say it again. Eventually, even Helen Thomas and David Gregory will a) drop dead, or b) report it.”
Exactly on BOTH points. Like I said, he needs to pound the table a lot more!
to them we are merely tax slaves. it is time to stand up to these criminals. i am so tired of hearing about the amount of money being spent on defense or our military; and then they can add such pork (unnecessary waste) to these bills for the children..give me a break. that manipulation doesn’t work on me, it is for your slimy buns to try to stay in office. FIRE the lot..
Try this!
3 items, 12 Billion, one state!