Reid wants ’08 candidates to be available for votes

In anticipation of a bruising week ahead, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wants the Senate’s four Democratic presidential candidates to call off campaign events to help thwart Republican objections in the escalating budget battle on Capitol Hill.

“I’m going to leave here and go call our presidentials and let them know that they better look at their schedules because these are not votes you can miss,” Reid said of Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Barack Obama (Ill.), Joseph Biden (Del.) and Chris Dodd (Conn.). He warned senators to prepare for possible weekend work ahead.

{mosads}The rhetoric over domestic spending priorities is heating up on Capitol Hill with only two months until the first votes are cast in the presidential nominating contest. After expected House passage, the Senate will take the final step and attempt to clear the package that would provide $215 billion in discretionary funding for the departments of Veterans Affairs, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS) and Education.

Reid, who held a long meeting Thursday evening with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders and appropriators, said the Senate will soon act on a short-term, stopgap measure to keep the government operating past Nov. 16, a vote to override the president’s veto on a water projects bill, and a bill funding the Defense Department.

The Senate majority leader also left open the option of pushing through a “bridge fund,” which would provide temporary money for the war in Iraq, an idea he rejected just days earlier.

Reid said that the Senate Appropriations Committee may start marking up a fiscal 2008 supplemental funding bill that would provide about $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats had been signaling that they would wait until next year to act on that measure.

“The things I’ve talked about doing here, Mr. President, are not things that we can do some other time,” Reid said. “We have to do them before we leave here for the Thanksgiving holiday.”

The first battle will likely come next week when Senate Republicans plan to test a new ethics rule that would allow them to wipe out the $65 billion for Veterans Affairs from the $151 billion Labor-HHS-Education bills. Republicans protest the process, saying Democrats are using the funding for veterans as a way to coerce Bush into accepting added funding for domestic programs in the Labor-HHS-Education bill, which he opposes.

Both sides are gearing up for a fight that will allow them to blame one another for potentially holding up funding for veterans right before Veterans Day, which is observed on Nov. 12.

Under the new ethics law, which was enacted in September, the Senate can strike language from a bill that was airdropped in during a House-Senate conference committee. If there are 41 votes to sustain the point of order, the objectionable language would be stripped and the rest of the bill would be sent back to the House for reconsideration. Before the law, sustaining Senate Rule 28 would essentially have killed the bill.

The rules were changed as part of Democratic promises to make conference committees more transparent.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) plans to raise a point of order, but it is not clear whether Republicans will have the votes to strike the language.

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would not predict whether there would be the votes to sustain a point of order, or whether the Senate parliamentarian would consider the Democratic move a potential violation of Senate Rule 28.

“I think I consistently, all year, not predicted what the vote count was going to be prior to having it,” McConnell said Friday. “I do think there’s a substantial objection on our side to lumping the bills together, particularly in this situation.”

At a Friday news conference with veterans’ groups, Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) predicted that the Senate would reach the 60 votes needed to override the point of order.

“I don’t think they will be divided,” Durbin said of the two bills.