Democrats setting veto trap for Bush

Whether or not the Senate reaches a veto-proof margin today on its embryonic stem cell bill, Democrats are eager to restage multiple votes on the issue, touting their work on expanding politically popular medical research while forcing President Bush into issuing more high-profile vetoes.

The bill’s backers see moral authority and electoral advantage in their push to lift the White House ban on federal funding for new studies using embryonic stem cells. Bush notched his first veto on last year’s stem cell bill despite broad public support for the research. The likelihood that another stem cell veto would follow Bush’s veto of the war supplemental helps to bolster Democrats’ message of meaningful challenge to the administration.

“During the last six years, the president received political cover from a Republican Congress that was eager to rubber-stamp his agenda,” a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Liz Oxhorn, said.

After the Democratic takeover, Oxhorn added, “that dynamic changed.” Democrats view the stem cell issue as a political winner that helped to tip the scales in several closely contested races last year, including Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D-Mo.) unseating of Republican incumbent Jim Talent and Rep. Patrick Murphy’s (D-Pa.) defeat of one-term GOP Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick.

“I hope we can do it, but if we can’t, we’ll be back, and back, and back, until we do,” stem cell cosponsor Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said.

The bill appears one vote short of the number needed to override a veto in the Senate, as Sens. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) and John Sununu (R-N.H.), both of whom oppose abortion rights, are expected to vote no.

Yet veto-override votes in the Senate, and possibly the House, will not be the last the president and his allies will hear on stem cells this year. Repeated votes on stem cell research are aimed at ratcheting up pressure on Bush and Republicans up for reelection, including Sununu.

The House will return to stem cells “as soon as possible,” according to a Democratic leadership aide, and as often as possible, according to Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), sponsor of the bill the House passed in January.

“The president can do it the easy way or the hard way,” DeGette said.

Following the likely presidential veto, DeGette said House Democrats would move to set aside new federal money for embryonic stem cell research via other bills. Those vehicles could include “must-pass” appropriations bills or other health-related measures, she suggested: “What we hope to gain is keeping this issue alive.”

House leadership has yet to decide whether to go straight to the floor with the Senate-approved language or to convene a conference, DeGette said. Either way, the Senate first would vote to attempt an override of Bush’s veto.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a stem cell cosponsor who sits with fellow backer Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) atop the Appropriations panel in control of federal health spending, expressed intentions similar to DeGette’s. The administration’s chief health research official, National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni, told Harkin’s subcommittee last month that he opposed Bush’s stance on the bill.

If the current trajectory holds, a majority of both houses of Congress will have voted seven times in just over two years for new federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Hammering away at President Bush on this issue puts Republicans such as Rep. Mike Castle (Del.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), both of whom support embryonic stem cell research, in an awkward position.

“It’s been more of a challenge than any of us would like, but we’ve got to keep pushing,” Hatch told reporters yesterday, contesting Bush’s assertion that stem cell research is equivalent to abortion. “A pro-life agenda demands that we care for the living, not just the unborn.”

Castle, meanwhile, “doesn’t think it’s helpful to keep poking the president in the eye,” the lawmaker’s deputy chief of staff, Elizabeth Wenk, said. Castle wants to move a bill Bush would sign, rather than the bill he already has vetoed, Wenk said.

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), targeted by Democrats for defeat in 2008, is leading the push for a bill supporting research on stem cells derived from already-dead embryos. That measure is expected to pass today, although Democrats point out that the research it allows is going on already. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) cosponsored the bill.

Coleman’s bill has no House counterpart. But Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), who has sponsored previous GOP alternative plans to expand stem cell research that does not involve destroying embryos, predicted a House bill would emerge.

Although the Family Research Council, a leader among conservative opponents of the stem cell bill, is taking no stance on the Coleman-Isakson proposal, some of its anti-abortion-rights allies are openly critical.

Coleman-Isakson “contains its own set of moral dilemmas,” Judie Brown, president of the American Life League (ALL), said in a statement that questioned whether doctors could be trusted to determine if embryos are truly dead.