Senate Extends Patriot Act, Passes Spending Reduction Bill

WASHINGTON _ An exhausted Senate on Wednesday decisively blocked drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while Vice President Dick Cheney dramatically arrived to cast the tie-breaking vote to trim spending for Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs by $39.7 billion over the next five years.

As senators desperately tried to wrap up their work for the year and head home for the holidays, they broke their stalemate over the USA Patriot Act, which gave law enforcement added authority to hunt down suspected terrorists following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bowing to a bipartisan group of lawmakers worried about preserving civil liberties, the Senate agreed to extend the law for six months while negotiating new rules governing, among other things, searches of library records, business records and medical records.

Senators also approved a defense authorization bill, which allows for a 3.1 percent pay raise for the military and a ban on the use of torture. And they sent the $453 billion defense appropriations bill, without the arctic drilling proposal, back to the House for approval.

“We know this Arctic. You don’t know the Arctic at all,” said an emotional Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who has fought to open the Alaskan wildlife refuge to drilling for the last quarter century. “It’s 2,000 acres of the Arctic. Is that worth this fight?”

But other senators called the search for petroleum in the pristine region a financial boondoggle for the oil industry. They said it would harm herds of caribou and other wildlife, and they said it would take years to begin producing not that much oil.

“Destroying this wilderness will do very little to reduce energy costs nor does it do very much for oil independence,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Stevens fell four votes short of the 60 needed to stop the Democratic filibuster and push the legislation through to President Bush’s desk. The vote was 56-44, with four Democrats siding with Stevens and two Republicans _ Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Mike DeWine of Ohio _ joining most Democrats and independent Jim Jeffords of Vermont to block the measure.

Wednesday’s session was an angry end to a long, drawn-out year. Senators accused each other of bad faith, personal attacks, childish antics and refusing to consider the national interest on a host of issues.

“Shame on them!” said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., after learning that Republicans had blamed Democrats for delaying money to the Gulf Coast states for hurricane relief, for preventing students from obtaining student loans and for holding up federal reimbursements to doctors treating elderly and disabled patients.

But Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., insisted that “Democrats will harm some people simply out of personal pique.”

That’s because even though Republicans prevailed, 51-50, in passing their budget-cutting bill with Cheney’s deciding vote, Democrats succeeded in pointing out several parliamentary flaws. Those flaws require that the measure return to the House to be fixed, voted upon and returned to the Senate, all of which may take a month or more before the bill can become law.

Nevertheless, Republicans could not contain their pride that for the first time in nearly a decade they had managed to restrain federal spending levels for mandatory entitlement programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and student loans, as a means to reduce the deficit.

Bush called it “a victory for taxpayers, fiscal restraint and responsible budgeting.” Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., declared: “We’ve stood firm and made tough choices.”

But Democrats said the deficit reduction was nothing more than an illusion. Combined with the recently approved $70 billion in capital gains tax cuts for the wealthy, they said, Republicans were actually increasing the federal debt. And they accused the GOP of picking on those Americans least able to defend themselves _ the poor, the elderly and the disabled.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called the budget “immoral” and “un-American.” Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois said it represents Republicans’ misplaced priorities.

“It takes away benefits from the most vulnerable Americans in order to give tax cuts to the most comfortable among us,” Durbin said.

The massive budget-cutting bill would reduce money for foster care by $343 million, preventing low-income grandparents from receiving payments for raising their grandchildren. It reduces student loan funding by $12.6 billion over five years, although most of that money would come from changing loan rates from adjustable to fixed interest rates.

Home health care payments from Medicare would be frozen for one year, while Medicaid rules would be changed to make it more difficult for elderly people to shift assets to their children in order to qualify for federal nursing home benefits. The bill would also allow states to increase co-payments for Medicaid beneficiaries in order to obtain medicine and health care.

After the Senate voted to block the defense spending bill in protest of the oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, lawmakers agreed to dump the drilling language and send the measure back to the House for approval.

The decision to oppose the defense spending bill was a difficult one for many senators. That’s because Stevens, the powerful chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, had tied his Arctic refuge plan to must-pass funding for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, he sweetened the legislation with $29 billion for disaster assistance along the Gulf Coast, $3.8 billion to help prepare for the avian flu, and an extra $2 billion for the Low Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program.

But without revenue from oil industry leases in the Alaskan refuge, senators were forced to drop the $2 billion in home heating assistance from the bill. A separate appropriations measure still contains $2.2 billion for the program in fiscal 2006. That bill, which funds the Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services, was approved late Wednesday.

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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