GOP Congress winds down

WASHINGTON -- In the final hours of Republican rule, the Senate put forward an all-purpose bill covering everything from normalized trade with Vietnam and tax breaks for millions of taxpayers to an expansion of offshore oil drilling.

The House, while preparing its own tax and trade agenda, gave conservatives perhaps their last chance for a while to vote on an abortion bill. It was defeated.

As of late yesterday, House and Senate negotiators were still struggling to come up with a common approach to the tax and trade package.

Senate Finance Committee leaders said they were bringing to the floor the session-ending package that would renew expired or expiring tax breaks for businesses and middle income individuals and trade items affecting economic relations with Vietnam, Haiti, Africa, and Andean nations.

The tax portion, said Finance Committee chairman Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, gives "continued tax relief to families paying college, teachers buying classroom supplies, and producers of clean energy from sources such as wind."

The package would also open up 8 million acres off the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling, postpone a planned cut in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and extend an abandoned coal mine reclamation program.

The House put off until today any vote on its Vietnam trade bill as lawmakers pondered whether to combine it with the tax break measure. Completing those bills could be the last major task before this Congress adjourns at the week's end, making way for the new Democratic-controlled Congress to convene on Jan. 4.

It remained uncertain whether the House and Senate could come together on a package that would not be so laden with expensive programs that it becomes unpassable.

The fix on Medicare payments is estimated to cost more than $10 billion over a one-year period. The abandoned mine bill could cost $5 billion over 10 years.

Among the tax breaks, a research and development deduction extension through 2006 and 2007 would cost $16.5 billion. Extending tuition deductions through the end of 2007 would cost $3.3 billion. Another provision allowing taxpayers in states without income taxes to deduct state and local sales taxes would cost $5.5 billion.

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Thomas, Republican of California, said they were working to keep Medicare payments within budgetary limits. "It will be revenue neutral if you squint."

House GOP leaders, in a parting gesture to their conservative base, brought up a bill that would require abortion providers to inform a woman 20 weeks into her pregnancy that an abortion would cause pain to the fetus.

The 250-to-162 vote was well short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate.

Had it passed, the legislation had almost no chance of advancing in the Senate, while the new Democratic Congress is expected to have little appetite for abortion-related bills.