GOP-led House leaves budget to Democrats

WASHINGTON – Rejected by voters and limping off stage, the Republican-led House on Friday passed a sweeping bill reviving expired tax breaks and protecting doctors from a big cut in Medicare payments.

As final adjournment loomed, Republicans dumped an unfinished budget on the Democrats about to take power, passing by a 320-70 vote a stopgap spending bill putting the government on autopilot until Feb. 15.

The Senate by voice vote barely met a midnight deadline to pass the stopgap funding measure, required to keep the government running, and then moved toward early morning votes on a hybrid tax, trade and energy bill.

But the failure to pass budget bills for domestic agencies, said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., amounted to “a blatant admission of abject failure by the most useless Congress in modern times.”

The House also worked into the night, passing a package of trade bills and the stopgap government funding bill. Under a complicated procedural pirouette, the tax and trade legislation – along with a plan to open 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling – was bundled together and sent to the Senate, where a handful of Republicans were opposed, though they withdrew threats to delay the Senate’s adjournment.

Republican budget hawks bridled at the measure’s cost, and textile state senators objected to trade provisions benefiting Haiti. The House passed the trade bill by a 212-184 margin.

The 367-45 vote on the tax bill reflected widespread bipartisan support for extending expired tax breaks, including the research and development tax credit for businesses, sales tax deductions for people in states without income taxes, the tax deduction on college tuition, a tax credit for hiring welfare recipients and others facing difficulties finding jobs and tax credits for alternative energy producers and purchases of solar energy equipment by homeowners and businesses.

All told, the tax cuts would cost $38 billion over five years.

Also driving the massive bill forward was an effort to prevent a 5 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors from taking effect Jan. 1. The GOP-crafted solution to the problem was criticized as an accounting gimmick since it would double the cost of fixing the problem again next year.

On the rest of the budget, work remained unfinished on nine of 11 spending bills, requiring the stopgap funding bill to put 13 Cabinet departments on autopilot through Feb. 15 frozen at or slightly below current levels.

Democrats face difficult choices and weeks of work on the leftover budget, which totals $463 billion and must be passed at President Bush’s strict budget limits.

“They are leaving us with a tremendous mess,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters. “We have alternatives, none of which are very good.”

Democrats made good on a promise to block an automatic congressional pay raise until the minimum wage is increased.

The House also approved, 330-59, an agreement to allow U.S. shipments of civilian nuclear fuel to India, an administration priority that is opposed by some because India, which has nuclear weapons, has not submitted to full international inspections. The Senate was poised to clear the bill for Bush’s signature.

The House approved by a voice vote a bill to keep open a special investigative office that has unearthed millions of dollars in waste and fraud in the rebuilding of Iraq. The office, which was set to end operations by October 2007, would stay open for an extra year under the bill, passed earlier by the Senate.

As is often the case at the end of the session, congressional leaders tried to lump popular items – extending the expired or expiring tax breaks – with other more contentious measures. Conservatives griped that the popular bills attracted costly add-ons benefiting retiring Republicans such as Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who obtained $30 million in concessions for hospitals in his state that treat large numbers of low-income patients.

The trade portion establishes permanent normal trade relations with Vietnam, which is generally supported, with the extension of trade benefits for sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and Andean nations. The Haiti provisions in particular raised red flags with lawmakers trying to protect home state textile industries.