With few legislative days remaining before the current continuing resolution expires Oct. 23, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said Tuesday that another CR might be needed to complete the 13 annual appropriations bills.
"It's possible," Armey told reporters. "We've got some very difficult issues."
Armey said family planning language continues to bog down the Foreign Operations funding bill, census sampling will complicate the Commerce-Justice-State bill, and education issues will plague the District of Columbia and Labor-HHS spending measures. He said the education debate over private school vouchers, testing and block grants represent "two different sets of values." He said GOP leaders still hope to adjourn during the weekend of Nov. 7 and want to complete all 13 funding bills to avoid an omnibus measure.
House Appropriations Chairman Livingston said the problem surrounding the family planning language is "as bad as it ever was."
On another difficult funding measure, Labor-HHS and Education Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Edward Porter, R-Ill., said House and Senate Republican leaders may have to intervene to settle differences on testing and block grants that exist between the two chambers.
"The positions on testing, for example, are diametrically opposed and they both passed by wide margins," Porter said. He added that House and Senate authorizers are still trying to work out the testing language. However, Livingston said he is not sure that GOP leaders will have to settle the Labor-HHS funding bill, adding that he hopes the appropriators can settle it. Conferees on the Labor-HHS bill are scheduled to meet later today.
On the line item veto issue, Livingston said he believes the president's vetoes on the Military Construction bill will stand. "I don't anticipate any effort to override and I don't think it would succeed."
Nonetheless, Rep. Joe Skeen, R-N.M., today introduced legislation today to overturn the line item vetoes of 38 military construction projects. "We've got a long trail to go ... but I wouldn't be pessimistic about it," Skeen told the Associated Press; Clinton's veto kills a $6.9 million upgrade to a launch pad at the White Sands missile range in Skeen's district. Skeen said his bill had already been cosponsored by Reps. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, and Norman Sisisky, D-Va., who also had projects penciled out by the president.
Meanwhile, Armey said he was not disturbed with the president's use of the line item veto. "We gave it to him; we expected him to use it," he said.
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