Fight over veto is near: President and Congressional Democratic Leaders Face Off on Embryo-Killing Research.(George W. Bush)

WASHINGTON (March 29, 2007)During the second half of April, the leaders of the congressional Democratic majorities in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House intend to force a showdown with President Bush over legislation that would mandate federal funding for the kind of stem cell research that would require the killing of human embryos.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nv.) will bring the legislation to the Senate floor on April 10.

Reid is the chief sponsor of the Senate version (S. 5) of the bill that would overturn a policy adopted by President Bush in 2001, which prohibits federal funding of stem cell research that requires harming human embryos. The Reid bill would mandate federal funding of the type of stem cell research that requires the killing of human embryos in order to harvest their stem cells. The embryos would be those authorized by the parents to be "donated from in vitro fertilization clinics, [and that] were created for the purposes of fertility treatment."

The Senate has agreed to spend 20 hours debating the issues surrounding stem cell research.

The House already passed a very similar bill (H.R. 3) on January 11, by a vote of 253174. In a statement sent to the House on the day of the vote, the White House said, "The bill would compel all American taxpayers to pay for research that relies on the intentional destruction of human embryos for the derivation of stem cells, overturning the President's policy that funds research without promoting such ongoing destruction. If H.R. 3 were presented to the President, he would veto the bill." (The entire White House policy statement is posted here: http://www.nrlc.org/killing_embryos/SAPHR3.html.)

While the margin of passage in the House was 18 votes greater than the same legislation had garnered in 2006due almost entirely to support from most of the newly elected Democratsit was still 32 votes short of the two-thirds margin that would be required to override a veto.

(The House roll call on H.R. 3 was published in the February issue of NRL News, pages 2223. It is also included in NRLC's scorecard of key pro-life House votes of the current Congress, available at the Legislative Action Center at the NRLC website, www.nrlc.org or www.capwiz.com/nrlc/home/.)