Chances poor for line-item veto legislation
House passed its version of the measure last month, but White House has not been pushing the bill as hard in the Senate.
Senate Budget Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., all but pronounced the White House's line-item veto proposal dead for the year, telling reporters Wednesday the Bush administration has not worked aggressively enough to round up the votes.
"I think people have gone back to the White House and said, 'Get us 60 votes and we'll take your position a little more seriously,'" Gregg said.
He also spoke openly about the likelihood of a post-election omnibus appropriations bill, a rare admission for a senior Republican. "We're headed in that direction, aren't we?" he said.
Discussions have been under way about taking up the House-passed line-item veto bill, approved in that chamber last month with 35 Democratic votes.
That bill is seen as having a better chance at passage than Gregg's more ambitious, multi-layered budget process overhaul bill, which he acknowledged has less of a chance than a stand-alone line-item veto measure.
"My problem is we haven't got the votes to pass it, obviously," Gregg said. His larger bill also has provisions aimed at controlling the growth of entitlement spending, which have provoked a strong reaction from Democrats.
Gregg accused Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and others of "demagoguery" for "waving the bloody shirt of Social Security" in order to drum up fears about his bill's impact on popular benefit programs.
Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman was omnipresent in the days leading up to the House line-item veto vote, and he has been calling senators on both sides of the aisle to try to win support for the measure.
But the White House has not engaged in the same kind of all-out effort it launched in the House, so as not to undercut negotiations between Gregg and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., over what form the legislation will take.
Gregg said he continues to advocate debate on his more comprehensive bill if neither that nor the line-item veto bill is going to garner 60 votes.
But with the legislative calendar dwindling, it is unlikely Frist would bring up the bill only to have it be filibustered, Gregg said.
Gregg said he would support freestanding line-item veto legislation, and indicated that he believed Democrats including Sens. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut would back the measure.
But Gregg noted that "eight or nine on my side" would be unlikely to support presidential line-item veto authority.
Gregg said he was trying to draw more attention to rapidly growing entitlement costs, in hopes Congress would eventually act. But he said election-year politics make it practically impossible to talk about overhauling entitlement programs.
He called the budget process "fundamentally flawed" in that the House and Senate could not even agree on a budget blueprint this year.
Gregg said every year it gets more difficult to do something about long-term deficits.
He said he would consider re-examining tax-cut policies but Democrats were unwilling to consider Social Security and Medicare changes in return, resulting in a stalemate.
"You can't reform entitlement programs unless you do it in a bipartisan way. First, because it wouldn't pass, and second, because the American people wouldn't buy it," Gregg said.