Despite a veto threat, the House passed a spending cut bill that President Clinton says saves pork-barrel projects but sacrifices social programs.
The House voted 235-189 Thursday to approve the bill to trim $16.4 billion from the federal budget for this year, while providing $7 billion for disaster relief and measures to deal with the Oklahoma City bombing.Only 10 Democrats voted for the package, and the margin of passage was well short of the two-thirds needed to overturn a presidential veto. The Senate has yet to consider the compromise bill, worked out in House-Senate negotiations earlier this week.
Clinton said again Thursday that he would veto the bill unless changes are made to take more money from federal construction projects. It would be his first veto. He noted that Congress approved one $100 million courthouse, money that is being taken out of education programs and his national service program.
"Democrats aren't blameless either," he said. "This is about pork over people."
In a speech Thursday at a dinner honoring the Congressional Asian Pacific American Institute, Clinton repeated his veto vow but said the dispute over the rescission bill is not about partisanship or even about whether to cut the deficit.
"The issue is not cutting spending. I am for it," Clinton said. "It is not a partisan issue. It is a dispute about yesterday's politics and tomorrow's politics," he said.
"My problem is that when the bill moved from a public process to a private process (the congressional conference), $1 billion of education money was taken out and $1 billion and more in pork was put back in," Clinton said.
Republicans rejected that notion, saying Clinton had approved the "pork" in the past. "Are we now to believe that the president has changed his mind and that all of these projects are pork?" asked House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston, R-La.
"In our transportation budget we cut $2.6 billion when the president had proposed a $420 million cut," Livingston said. "We have made a sincere effort to responsibly trim government spending."