Senate Challenging the President

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today encouraging President Bush to exercise his first veto should the bloated Senate emergency spending bill make it to his desk:

All bad things must come to an end, and it may just be that President Bush's record for not casting vetoes will soon be history. So much the better that he is promising to break his dubious record by nixing the astonishing supplemental spending bill passed by the Senate yesterday.

If ever a bill deserved a veto, this is it. The ball of blubber rolled out of the world's greatest spending body at $108.9 billion, a mere $14.4 billion more than Mr. Bush requested. The original request was for Iraq, Afghanistan and hurricane relief, but these "emergency" spending bills have become regular bacchanalia because they fall outside the limits set by the annual budget spending "caps."

It doesn't look like this barrel of pork will ever get to the White House in its current form. The House doesn't appear to want to play along:

Meanwhile, over in the House, GOP leaders are finally behaving like, well, Republicans. Speaker Denny Hastert declared the Senate bill "dead on arrival" in a House-Senate conference. "The House has no intention of joining in a spending spree at the expense of American taxpayers," he added. Hallelujah.

The Senate needs a slap-down, and whether it comes from the House or the White House, the sooner the better.