Senate Republican leaders are trying to get a consensus to vote in the coming weeks on legislation to expand President Bush’s embryonic stem cell policy and several other related bills, including one to promote potential new stem cell research that doesn’t harm embryos.
“I’d like to get clean votes on a number of bills,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, said yesterday.
No decisions have been made, but the Senate is expected to act on the issue in the next few weeks.
Sens. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, and Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, have been pushing for a vote on House-passed legislation that they’re sponsoring, which would expand Mr. Bush’s 2001 policy on embryonic stem cell research. Their bill — which would allow federal funding of research using leftover embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics — has enjoyed broad support and is expected to come to the floor.
But Mr. Frist and other Senate conservatives say if that bill gets a clean vote, then so should a bill being drafted to fund research into techniques harmless to embryos that would create cells, similar to embryonic stem cells, which can morph into almost any type of body cell.
“If that can be accomplished, that would be ethically acceptable to everybody,” Mr. Frist said.
Four of the new potentially nondestructive techniques were outlined in the May 2005 report from the President’s Council on Bioethics and highlighted by scientists in a hearing Mr. Specter held yesterday.
But supporters of the Specter-Harkin bill worry that adding other bills to the slate is a political move that could peel support from their bill, which Mr. Bush has pledged to veto.
“A lot of people don’t like it because they feel like it’s a stacked deck,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican and supporter of the Specter-Harkin bill, said of Mr. Frist’s suggested plan for several votes.
Mr. Harkin said the new techniques bill is an attempt by Republicans and the White House to “muddy the waters” and draw support away from his bill.
Mr. Specter and other supporters say they support exploring new research techniques, but want the Senate to vote first on the Specter-Harkin bill, as well as a House-passed bill promoting umbilical-cord-blood treatments and research.
Meanwhile, Sen. Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican, said he’ll filibuster the Specter-Harkin bill if he doesn’t get a straight up-or-down vote on his bill to ban all forms of human cloning.
“If they get a clean shot … then I should get a clean shot,” he said.
He said Mr. Frist proposed late Monday that the Senate vote on five bills, with no amendments — the Specter-Harkin embryonic stem cell bill, the cord-blood bill, the new techniques bill, the cloning ban and another Brownback bill to ban research that melds animal cells with human embryos.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, said Republicans haven’t been able to agree among themselves as to which bills to bring up.
Mr. Specter said he is confident that his bill will pass.
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