Bush ready to sign off on massive spending bill being fine-tuned by Congress

The White House has signaled its embrace of a $463.5 billion omnibus spending bill, removing doubts that the measure will soon be on President Bush's desk.

Many House Republicans will nonetheless oppose it, saying the measure is being rushed to the floor for a vote Wednesday without adequate time to read it and without the chance to offers changes during floor debate.

Some of the harshest criticism came from an unusual source, former Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis of California, typically an easygoing sort whose loyalties are torn between GOP leaders and the powerful Appropriations Committee. He tore into the Democrats for skipping "any prior debate whatsoever and ... the opportunity to offer even one amendment on the floor."

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey countered that the bill is simply "the last remaining legislation that needs to be passed to clean up the mess left to us by the past Congress."

Senate Republicans declined to put any real effort into passing eight of 11 spending bills before the November election and didn't try at all afterward.

The House Rules Committee, dominated by Democrats, issued a rule governing floor debate that denies Republicans any chance to amend the 137-page measure, which covers 13 Cabinet departments covering the budgets for every domestic agency except for the Department of Homeland Security.

Debate will last one hour.

Through a spokesman, Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., declined to provide a list of amendments that her Republican rivals had hoped to offer on the floor.

While Republicans complained bitterly about how the bill came together, it is, generally speaking, a GOP-tilting measure keeping to the same overall "cap" insisted upon by Bush and congressional Republicans last year.

Most agencies and programs are kept frozen at last year's budget levels, but Obey and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., negotiated a scores of exceptions for agencies and programs that required increases to avoid imposing furloughs and hiring freezes, or cutting critical services such as medical care for veterans.

Many of the increases came at the expense of White House priorities such as foreign aid and a big Pentagon base closing initiative approved by Congress less than two years ago.

The pending bill has something to please _ and offend _ every lawmaker, but the overall feeling is simply one of relief that the uncertainty of last year's unresolved budget will soon be gone.

Lawmakers in both parties hailed the bill for freeing highway construction funds, even as the White House complained that the bill will slow aid to communities harmed by a 2005 round of military base closings and cut a request for basic scientific research.

The powerful veterans lobby won a $3.6 billion increase for medical care, earning praise from veterans groups and the White House, while low-income college students would receive a $260 boost in the maximum Pell Grant, to $4,310.

"After five years of broken promises from the administration, this is an important down payment by Democrats on our commitment to help families with high college costs," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

State and local law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, won increases in grants for new equipment and hiring new officers.

Community development block grants, however, were frozen at current levels, as was Amtrak. But advocates for those programs took them as a victory relative to Bush's budget submitted a year ago.

Activists pressing for big boosts to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis overseas won a $1.3 billion increase _ to $4.5 billion. That's enough to fund the president's $225 million initiative to fight malaria and increase the U.S. contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to $724 million.

Republicans in the Senate appeared unlikely to place procedural hurdles in its path. Still, they took issue with Democrats' claim to have "scrubbed" the bill free of homestate projects. They pointed to $50 million to match last year's funding for the Denali Commission, which funds rural road, sanitation, energy and other infrastructure projects in Alaska.

Then there was the Senate's refusal to kill $45 million in funding for an indoor rainforest project in central Iowa, even though local backers have yet to come up with their required share of funding.

The measure also lifted funding for highways, transit and motor carrier safety programs by $4 billion _ to the amount specified in the six-year highway spending bill passed in 2005 and increases funding every year.

Senate Republicans predicted that Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would schedule debate close to a Feb. 15 deadline and give them little choice but to pass the bill.

"What do they want?" Reid asked. "To close the government down?"

Asked how he thought debate might go, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said: "Quickly."

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On the Net:

House Appropriations Committee: http://appropriations.house.gov/