Delayed Spending Bills Prompt Finger-Pointing

President Bush criticized congressional Democrats yesterday for failing to send him a raft of spending bills, declaring that they should "stop wasting time and get essential work done on behalf of the American people.

"Today Congress set a record they should not be proud of: October the 26th is the latest date in 20 years that Congress has failed to get a single annual appropriations bill to the president's desk," Bush said in a White House news conference.

In response, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) criticized the president on the cost of the Iraq war: "This Congress' record on fiscal discipline and meeting our national priorities sends the President this message: the days of the fiscally irresponsible Rubber Stamp Congress are over," she said in a statement.

The back and forth highlighted Congress's struggle this year to perform its most basic duty: funding the federal government. Democrats have been bickering among themselves over a strategy for moving the bills to the president, who has threatened to veto most of them in a dispute over domestic spending priorities.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.), with Pelosi's backing, wants to carefully package the bills to beat a veto, but Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) wants to move the biggest of them to Bush quickly, and engage in political battle. In the balance hang spending initiatives that reflect the party's values: more money for police officers and veterans, cancer research and environmental science, help for children, seniors and the working poor.

The $22 billion in extra spending Democrats want is a small fraction of the $2.7 trillion budget. But the White House, eager to reclaim a reputation for fiscal responsibility, has no incentive to compromise, and congressional leaders know it.

"If the White House wants to hold their ground at all costs . . . if they don't want to make any conciliatory moves, they can win most of these. They know that," Obey said. "But we pay . . . a huge price in missed opportunities."

While the last of 12 spending bills passed through the House by early August, they have been bogged down in the Senate. Early this week, the Senate passed the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education bill, which Reid said will be the first bill to go to the president's desk. The $600 billion bill contains nearly half of the extra domestic spending that Democrats want and Bush opposes. A veto, some Democrats say, would let them score points by comparing Bush's balk at a small bump in spending at home with the cost of a five-year war, which with his latest request would total nearly $200 billion.

"More than half of what he disagrees with is in this one bill. So it seems to me this would be a good place to start," Reid said.

But the Labor-Health bill is likely to be the last spending bill to pass the Senate this session, leaving five unfinished. Some top Senate Democrats favor sending the finished bills to the president one by one, to show progress, but they do not agree on which bills should go first. Others say Democrats would gain more leverage by combining bills Bush wants to veto with ones he won't, such as homeland security.

Obey wants to wait awhile. If Bush will not compromise, Obey said, he wants to "make it as clear as possible what we are trying to do and why it's preferable to what the president is trying to do."

Democrats are also at odds over earmarks, the pet spending projects that some voters seize on as symbols of government waste and that Democrats have pledged to reduce. The House cut earmarks in its versions of the spending bills to half of last year's levels. But the Senate has trimmed them by 20 percent. Last week, senators battled on the floor over an earmark in the Labor-Health bill for a Woodstock music festival museum. The project, sponsored by New York Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, was cut.

Such skirmishes have chewed up months, crowding out initiatives such as a gun law that would strengthen mental-health background checks in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, and one of the biggest bills of the session, the 2008 farm bill. Congress has already voted to extend its budget deadline from Oct. 1 to Nov. 16.

Another continuing resolution looks likely, and some in both parties predict the spending saga will drag into January. Delays increase the risk that in the end, Democrats will have to merge unfinished bills into a single omnibus, whose hundreds of pages would blur their domestic agenda and hand Republicans a coup.

"We're coming down to the end of this session or the end of this year where everything is going to come together in, what I presume, will be a very bloated, large appropriations spending bill, which the president will probably have to veto," said Senate Republican Whip Trent Lott (Miss.).