From The Star-Tribune, 12/10/06:
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/16209459.htm
Posted on Sun, Dec. 10, 2006email thisprint thisGOP heaps scorn on
retiring Frist
By MARGARET TALEV
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON --
Just before the 109th Congress finally adjourned shortly before dawn
Saturday, retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist got some
last-minute perks for his home state of Tennessee -- and took a
rhetorical beating from his colleagues.
Some Republicans heaped scorn on Frist, faulting him for fostering
runaway federal spending.
Late Friday night, House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis,
R-Calif., said icily in a speech on the House floor that Congress'
failure to pass nine of 11 appropriations bills "should be placed
squarely at the feet of the departing [Senate] majority leader."
The House passed its version of the bills, but the Senate did not.
Congress passed a stopgap spending bill that continues federal funding
at current levels until mid-February.
Frist managed to stick some pork for the folks back home into the
final bills passed, however.
A sweeping tax, trade, Medicare and oil bill that passed early
Saturday extended a sales-tax deduction for taxpayers in Tennessee, as
well as Texas and other states with no income tax.
Tennessee hospitals, meanwhile, got help covering uninsured and
underinsured patients.
And songwriters collectively got an estimated $3 million tax break,
something many constituents in Nashville will appreciate.
An angry Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., a fiscal conservative and Budget
Committee chairman, said:
"This is being done by the Republican leadership to the Republican
membership.
"You just have to ask yourself how we, as a party, got to this point,
where we have a leadership which is going to ram down the throats of
our party the biggest budgetbuster in the history of the Congress
under Republican leadership," Gregg said.
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That's not nice
Harry
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