Just before 11 p.m., an hour or so after the Senate overwhelmingly passed its own emergency appropriations bill, the House finally voted, ending a nearly 11-hour-long session of primarily partisan feuding that centered around a number of Democrat-championed amendments, several of them, designed to redirect money from such areas as foreign aid and defense spending into homeland security, failed.

“We came very, very close – I was disappointed,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, who supported the amendments. DeLauro promised to continue her efforts to get adequate funding to states for their Homeland Security efforts.

That the House Democrats’ campaign was in trouble was evident by early afternoon, when Wisconsin Rep. David Obey’s amendment proposing an extra $2.5 billion for homeland security was voted out of order.

Nevertheless, Democrats kept swinging long into the evening, proposing amendments to bolster security, send aid to Haiti, even to prevent Vice President Richard Cheney from giving Iraq reconstruction contracts to Halliburton.

DeLauro, Friday, stood by the importance of her efforts. “I brought the views of my police chiefs, fire chiefs, EMS personnel,” she said. “Those are important things for the country to hear.”

The early vote on Obey’s homeland security amendment split the Connecticut delegation neatly along party lines, with Democrats John Larson and DeLauro voting for the increased funding, and Republicans Nancy Johnson, Christopher Shays, and Robert Simmons against.

“We’re putting an extreme burden on our cities and our municipalities,” DeLauro said Friday. “I met with a fire chief, police chief, new medical personnel, in the district, in the new part of the district,” she said. “All of the folks indicated that they are really at a significant loss.”

The congresswoman, along with Reps. James McGovern of Massachusetts and Ike Skelton of Missouri, had proposed an amendment that would take $61 million of foreign aid from Colombia and redirect it to U.S. first responders. “President Bush asked Congress to ‘refrain from attaching items not directly related to the emergency at hand,’” DeLauro said in a press release. "Every dollar is needed to support the men and women who protect our communities from terrorism and other threats."

Shays said Friday that he supported DeLauro’s amendment and an increased level of homeland security funding. The amendment offered by Obey, Shays said, was out of order because the sponsors were not willing to fulfill the requirement that they offset the funds they were adding.

“You do have rules,” Shays said Friday, “and you have to follow the rules, and that’s discouraging for members sometimes.”

The bill already included $4.2 billion for homeland security.

For Johnson, the issue was not just the level of funding, but how it was used.

“If we just spread money across the country, we won’t necessarily improve our preparedness, because the likelihood of an attack in some areas is much higher than in some others,” she said Friday. “We need to get money there and then watch and analyze its use.”

While Johnson said that big cities, like New York “need to be at the top of our target list,” she added that, if New York were to be attacked again, some of their support would come from Connecticut.

Johnson said she supports funding for police officers and firefighters, including grant programs for local police and firefighters. Establishing “a very good communications system” and improving stockpiles of emergency equipment are both high on her priority list, she said.

According to Shays, “We aren’t doing enough to get the money out that we already have in the pipeline. And we need to increase the amount. But not every community around the country needs it”

By 8:30, tempers seemed to be fraying, and the subject matter made passions run high. The most podium-cracking debate of the day came later, in discussion of the amendment proposed by Republican Reps. Mark Kennedy, R-Mo., and George Nethercutt, R-Wash., which, according to Kennedy, was intended “to protect the interests of American taxpayers and reward ‘Coalition of the Willing’ members by preventing those that didn’t participate from getting our taxpayer dollars.” The amendment would exclude French, Russian, German and Syrian companies from receiving reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

Anyone tuned in could see this was a heavyweight bout – House Republicans were defending their title. Some who supported the amendment called upon the memory of the thousands of American soldiers who died in France in World War II. Opponents recalled the aid the French gave the founding fathers during the American Revolution. Republican Baker made the “weasel” remark. Rep. Doug Ose, R-Calif., pounded furiously on the podium as he demanded that Congress “not spend American dollars on a cross of gold.” Obey called the amendment “consumer fraud masquerading as legislation.”

Johnson, on Friday, said the amendment was “not unreasonable,” however, she added “while I share Kennedy’s anger and frustration… the rebuilding of Iraq must be done on a timetable, and with multinational collaboration, and in the long run, I don’t think we should take the position that these nations have no role.”

Shays was not present for the vote on Kennedy’s amendment, but said Friday he had reservations about it. Excluding nations that were not members of the president’s “coalition of the willing,” he said, seemed to be “a backwards way of saying that we are going to make money off the rebuilding of Iraq, and the administration doesn’t want any part of that.” He emphasized that the war was about the freedom of the Iraqi people, not about money.

The amendment was passed on a voice vote.
The House had rejected an amendment that would remove a provision from the bill that set aside $1 billion for aid to Turkey. The language of the bill would give the president discretion over whether the aid is issued and says he should “take into consideration budgetary and economic reforms undertaken by Turkey.”

The House bill also contains a provision for $3.2 billion in aid to some U.S. airlines.
Larson said he believes that "this is the first of several supplementals that may come down the pike because nobody can predict how long the war will last.” And the House bill still needs to be reconciled with the Senate version, which proposes to spend nearly $80 billion, about $2 billion more than the House, offers less aid to the airlines, and does not contain a parallel to the Kennedy amendment.