Friday, May 9
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress appears increasingly unlikely to meet its goal of approving President Bush's war funding request before Memorial Day as divisions deepened among Democrats and the White House issued a fresh veto threat.

With only two full weeks remaining before the Memorial Day recess, the measure has yet to pass either the House or the Senate.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pulled the bill from the schedule Wednesday night after conservative-to-moderate "Blue Dog" Democrats revolted over Democratic leaders' insistence on including in the war funding bill an unrelated provision to sharply increase education benefits for veterans under the GI Bill.

The new GI Bill -- designed to give Iraq war veterans enough help to finance a four-year stint at a public college -- would cost $51 billion over 10 years. It runs afoul of a rule designed to prevent new benefit programs from causing the deficit to spiral.

The Democratic rebels are the House's top supporters of "pay as you go" budget rules that require that new benefit programs be financed with offsetting spending cuts or new taxes so as not to cause the budget deficit to increase. The war funding

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bill is an emergency appropriation, but the veterans education funding is a new mandatory benefit program that's supposed to be subject to the budget rule.

"It's the principle involved of not putting a mandatory program of any kind on an emergency supplemental," said Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn.

Meanwhile, White House budget director Jim Nussle weighed in Thursday with renewed veto threats against rival House and Senate Iraq funding bills, saying the add-ons for veterans and an extension of unemployment benefits were unacceptable.

Also Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee postponed for a week a vote on its version of the war funding bill, which exceeds Bush's demands by $9 billion. Now, it appears the Senate won't complete floor debate on the measure until just before it recesses for Memorial Day vacation.

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