For a president that spent six years signing every bloated budget bill he could find, and who has been a bigger spender than any president since LBJ, Bush has suddenly found his inner tightwad, at least as far as education, healthcare, and worker protections are concerned.
President Bush vetoed a $606 billion spending bill Tuesday that would have funded education, health and labor programs for the current fiscal year, complaining that it was larded with pork and too expensive as he took aim at a top priority of the new Democratic Congress. […]
At the same time, the president signed a $471 billion Defense Department spending bill that funds regular Pentagon operations other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By signing a military spending bill with a sizeable increase while rejecting a domestic spending bill with a smaller one, Bush set the stage for a bruising battle with Congress over national goals. Democrats immediately denounced him for readily agreeing to spend money on the military while resisting what they call needed investments in programs at home.
While the White House is anxious to characterize this as some kind of partisan fight, the funding package (which includes money for Medicare and Medicaid) actually passed the House with more than 50 Republican votes. For that matter, the whining over earmarks is misleading — the Pentagon bill also included “pork,” but Bush didn’t hesitate to sign it.
Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, noted, “With today’s veto, the president has shown once again how out of touch and out of step he is with the values of America’s families. Cancer research, investments in our schools, job training, protecting workers, and many other urgent priorities have all fallen victim to a president who squanders billions of dollars in Iraq but is unwilling to invest in America’s future.”
If anything, Kennedy’s comment wasn’t nearly harsh enough.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Robert Greenstein highlighted the president’s “misplaced values.”
With this veto, the President is saying that this nation can’t afford even to maintain current service levels in education, medical research, “meals on wheels” for the elderly, and other areas. In fact, he has proposed cutting funding for programs in the vetoed bill by $7 billion below the current levels, adjusted for inflation. Congress, by contrast, would boost funding by $5 billion. To reach the President’s funding levels, Congress would have to cut from the vetoed bill $1.4 billion for medical research, $1.3 billion for K-12 education, and $254 million for Head Start, among other items.
So, what happens now? The House approved the domestic spending last week with 274 votes — just three shy of a two-thirds majority. In contrast, the Senate passed the bill with 56 votes, 11 short of a veto-proof majority. In other words, an override would be awfully tough.
Stay tuned.