House Passes Legislation For Disaster Relief Tied To The Deal, However, Is A Government Shutdown Block

The House passed legislation Thursday to help dozens of states recover from natural disasters, but only after coupling it with a move to eliminate future government shutdowns that assures the bill of a presidential veto.

With the 244-178 vote, the disaster relief bill goes to a House-Senate conference, where differences must be worked out before it can be sent to President Clinton.

The president, while urging Congress to move quickly on the $8.4 billion emergency spending bill, promises a veto if it contains the shutdown amendment. The administration contends the measure would give Congress an easy way to block spending sought by the White House.

“This bill is on a collision course with the president,” said Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.

Republicans, on a near party-line 227-197 vote, pushed through the noshutdown language, which would freeze funding at previous-year levels when Congress and the White House can’t agree on spending bills, as happened in 1995.

“It rewards inaction by the Congress. It rewards lack of hard choices by the Congress,” Obey said.

Rep. George Gekas, R-Pa., author of the no-shutdown measure, said he was attaching it to the disaster relief bill because “it brings shame on the shoulders of every American citizen to allow the government to shut down…. It is our duty to try to prevent a shutdown.”

House Speaker Newt Gingrich personally lobbied senior Republicans on the Appropriations Committee, some of whom were unhappy about linking the spending bill to the shutdown issue, to follow the party line and support the bill.

There is wide bipartisan support for the underlying bill, which would provide $5.5 billion to fund disaster relief efforts in 35 states, particularly the Dakotas and innesota, still reeling from calamitous spring floods. The bill also includes $2 billion for peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and the Mideast.

It contains dozens of other smaller additions to the 1997 budget, including $186 million for disaster repair work at Yosemite National Park, $20 million for expenses incurred in the TWA Flight 800 crash investigation and $20 million for Vietnam prisoner of war payments.

The intent of the bill’s authors was to match all new spending with cuts in other programs, mainly in housing and defense. But the difficulty of accomplishing that was evident when Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., succeeded in removing $1.6 billion in highway and airport trust fund money from the list of programs to be cut.