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American Morning

Senate Republicans Make Budget Legislation Blunder

Aired May 04, 2001 - 11:06   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: From Capitol Hill, the definitive word seemed to be oops, that after something very odd happened yesterday after they tried to tackle the budget.

With more on that, let's go to Kate Snow on Capitol Hill -- hi, Kate.

KATE SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Daryn. Well, you know what? It keeps getting stranger and stranger as we try to sort out what exactly did happen at about 2:00 this morning. Basically, what happened was there were a couple of pages literally missing when the House tried to take up the budget document, the budget that had been agreed on through a compromise earlier in the week.

Now, that budget is about two inches thick. They had to photocopy it before they could take it over to the House floor and vote on it. And the word from the House Budget Committee is that they simply lost a couple of pages along the way.

Now we're also hearing from Senate sources, including a senior Republican aide and a Senate Democrat, that they think those two pages were key pages, that those two pages had to do with the tax cut, the $1.35 trillion tax cut over 11 years that was settled on earlier in the week as a number that they could live with between moderate Democrats in the Senate as well as the White House and Republican negotiators.

So, Daryn, it's a little bit confusing. But basically right now, we have just a little bit of delay while they work to find those two pages. They've set the vote now tentatively anyway for Tuesday of next week, although I'm also hearing that the Senate thinks they may not take up now until Wednesday, Daryn.

FRAZIER: Kate, despite the delay, do you think that that's going to have any effect in what the end result will be?

SNOW: Probably not much, Daryn. In fact, the Republicans speaker of the House last night called this a technical error. He said, "We're still going to pass this thing through." And Republicans are quite confident of that, that they will have the votes to sustain this budget.

The budget again contains some of these key agreements that they made earlier in the week. They did, though, make a couple of changes yesterday. Throughout the day, there were closed-door meetings. One key change, Daryn, involved emergency spending.

They had set aside $5 billion in the budget as a line for emergency spending. The idea was to make sort of a cap so that the Congress couldn't spend a lot on extra so-called emergencies. That amount has actually now been removed from the budget. So it brings down the spending a little bit. But they fully expect that somewhere down the road they'll figure out how to spend on emergencies in any case, Daryn.

KAGAN: Kate Snow on Capitol Hill, thank you.

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