Reid wants '08 candidates to be available for votes next week

Reid wants '08 candidates to be available for votes
By Manu Raju
November 02, 2007

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.

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 a $215 billion package that would provide 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.”

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