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Budget bill finally ready for president's signatureSenators rescue bill from cheesy quagmireNovember 19, 1999 WASHINGTON (CNN) - The final product of the federal government's fiscal 2000 budget season cleared the halls of the Capitol on Friday and is on its way to President Bill Clinton. The Senate passed the last fiscal 2000 "omnibus" appropriations bill by a vote of 74-24 early Friday evening. Passage of the measure brings to a close a lengthy ordeal characterized by sharp, often tense negotiations between the Clinton Administration and congressional Republicans. House passage of the sprawling, $390 billion, 2,000 page bill -- by a vote of 296-135 -- came late Thursday afternoon. Friday's Senate passage was not easy. The bizarre saga of the fiscal 2000 budget took a turn toward the comical earlier Friday, when Senate consideration of the bill was gummed up by the power of cheese -- or more accurately, talk of cheese and cheese-related foodstuffs. 
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) was at the center of the bill's temporary imprisonment. Feingold, his counterpart Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin) and a handful of other senators from Midwestern dairy states mounted a filibuster -- a calculated floor strategy intended to indefinitely hold up a bill's progress -- because they were displeased with dairy product pricing legislation that had been inserted into the budget measure. The impasse was broken late Friday afternoon when the dairy state senators relented after Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) agreed to revisit the issue next year. Their word was good enough for Feingold and Kohl, who stepped back and allowed a final vote to proceed.
Lott greeted the agreement, which would allow senators to return home for the holidays, with glee. "The Senate teaches you patience," he said. "If there's anything in the world that's like a good wine, it's the Senate." Earlier, Feingold gave his Senate brethren fits by reading from a special binder on the Senate floor -- a binder crammed full of cheese dish recipes and lists of dairy farmers who might be adversely affected by the language. The clutch of dairy state lawmakers opposed a section of the bill that would scrap a new Agriculture Department dairy product pricing plan in favor of the current system, which has been in place since the 1930s. Midwestern dairy interests argue the Depression-era pricing policy is slanted toward Northeastern states, and say the Agriculture Department's changes are long overdue. His fellow upper chamber lawmakers, eager to pass the bill and go home for the rest of the year, failed to see any humor in Feingold's maneuver. "No one in there is happy," said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) earlier in the day as she motioned over her shoulder toward the Senate floor. The Senate seemed destined for an all-nighter. The chamber's GOP leadership had scheduled a "cloture" vote for 1 a.m. ET Saturday that was intended to break the filibuster. The cloture vote was moved to the late afternoon, and was successful, by an 87-9 tally. The final budget bill was 51 days late in reaching Clinton's Oval Office desk for his signature. The administration and congressional Republicans squared off in marathon negotiations in recent days, before churning out a compromise bill late Wednesday night. Anticipating a long road in the Senate for the budget bill, Clinton, in Athens, Greece, Friday signed the eighth continuing resolution enacted since the fiscal year began on October 1. The temporary bill, intended to keep as-yet unfunded portions of the government in operation, expires December 2, giving Clinton plenty of time to read the full bill before he signs it. Since then, the Clinton White House has claimed victory after a number of its priorities were preserved in the bill. Among those: $1.3 billion to for the hiring of some 100,000 new teachers nationwide; $926 million to cover the United States' long overdue membership payments to the United Nations; and extra money for a number of environmental and health care projects. Congressional Republicans have touted victories of their own, including a 0.38 percent across-the-board cut to the 2000 budget of every government department and agency, and language restricting the use of U.S. funds by foreign population control organizations that may advocate or support abortion. The budget has found its way into a handful of presidential campaigns in the course of hours since it passed the House. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) said in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday that he would vote against the full bill on the Senate floor because it is an "abomination...a scathing, unconscionable depiction of the way we do business in Washington." McCain, who did vote against the bill Friday, objected to what he said were a myriad of accounting "gimmicks" used in the bill to keep its final spending numbers under the caps imposed by the 1997 balanced budget agreement between Congress and the Clinton White House. "It is full of foolishness," McCain said Thursday. GOP front-runner, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, said were he in the White House, this budget "would be far different because (he) would have provided presidential leadership earlier in the budget process." Vice President Al Gore, however, defended the budget toiling of the administration, saying the final product was a "victory for fiscal discipline." CNN's Bob Franken and The Associated Press contributed to this report, which was written by Ian Christopher McCaleb |
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