Sixty three votes is great, but it won’t be enough to reverse Bush.
The Senate voted Tuesday after two days of emotional debate to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and sent the measure to President Bush for a promised veto, the first of his presidency.
The bill passed 63-37, four votes short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to override Bush’s veto. The president left little doubt he would reject the bill despite late appeals on its behalf from fellow Republicans Nancy Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The simple answer is he thinks murder’s wrong,” said White House spokesman Tony Snow. “The president is not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something living and making it dead for the purposes of scientific research.”
I wish I could convey how annoying this rhetorical nonsense has become. As Michael Kinsley explained quite well not too long ago, “Stem-cell research does not cause the creation or destruction of a single additional embryo. It uses embryos that are routinely discarded as part of IVF. Once a stem-cell line is created, it can be reproduced in the laboratory and requires no embryos at all. So Bush’s ban on federally funded stem-cell research involving embryos destroyed after Aug. 9 [2001] will not directly save any embryo’s life. His rationale is that allowing such research implies federal government approval of the creation and destruction of embryos, and thus may encourage it indirectly. Meanwhile, the government encourages and even subsidizes IVF directly, Bush praises it, and has done nothing to stop it.”
Snow’s “murder” comment should be repeated, ad nauseam, through the election cycle. As rhetoric goes, this is a special kind of stupid.
As for veto override, it was always a long shot. We didn’t have the votes in the House and getting 67 members of this Senate to agree on any policy issue is pretty tough, especially in the face of a veto threat. Of course, next year, if there’s a Dem Senate….