Restriction restored in Senate spending bill

 By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

 WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans, flexing their new political muscle on Capitol Hill, have
 quietly killed language in a sweeping spending bill that would have effectively ended the ban on
 American travel to Cuba.

 The full House and the Senate Appropriations Committee voted last year to stop funding
 enforcement of the 40-year-old ban, a move that would have permitted Americans to travel freely
 to the communist state. Opponents of the travel prohibition said they had solid, bipartisan support in
 the full Senate to approve what could have represented a dramatic change in US policy toward
 Cuba.

 But the Senate never finished its 2003 spending bills, and when senators wrapped all the unfinished
 appropriations measures into an omnibus package this week the language lifting the travel ban had
 been removed, according to the offices of Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, and
 several other lawmakers who scanned the bill.

 Anti-Cuba forces said senators were fixing ''bad legislation'' and sparing a possible veto by
 President Bush, who supports the travel ban and the economic embargo against Cuba as a way of
 weakening dictator Fidel Castro.

 Angry supporters of lifting the ban, alerted to the language change in the 1,052-page bill, said
 Senate leaders were inappropriately using a massive spending bill to further their agenda.

 The move ''allowed people to stand up and do the right thing'' in public, ''but do the wrong thing
 behind the scenes,'' said Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

 Democrats complained that quashing the Cuba initiative was part of a pattern by the new GOP
 majority to use the massive spending bill to further the Republican political agenda.

 The bill initially included a $374 million cut to Amtrak. The Senate late Thursday approved a
 Democratic amendment adding the money back into the 2003 budget, but the reinstatement must
 also be approved by the House if the financially ailing railroad is to avoid bankruptcy.

 The Senate bill would also reduce enforcement funds at the Securities and Exchange Commission
 by $94 million to $656 million, an amount Democrats say is too low to ensure adequate
 enforcement of the corporate responsibility package Bush signed into law last year.

 The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program or LIHEAP, a program popular in the
 Northeast, was trimmed by $300 million to $1.7 billion in the package drafted by the new GOP
 majority in the Senate.

 ''They're remaking a lot of the things we thought we had bipartisan support for,'' said Senate
 minority leader Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota.

 Republicans say the Senate is just trying to bring spending under control to comply with targets set
 by the Bush administration. ''The Senate wants to discipline itself,'' Senator Ted Stevens,
 Republican of Alaska and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told his colleagues on the
 floor.

 Representative William D. Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat who is active on Cuban issues, said policy
 toward the impoverished Caribbean nation was ''being controlled by a small clique that will
 manipulate, forestall, and refuse to change a policy that is a Cold War anachronism.

 ''You have this rush to enact this omnibus bill and as a result, any initiatives of significant
 controversy are stripped out of it,'' Delahunt said, vowing to raise the issue again this year.

 The $390 billion appropriations package would set spending levels for the current fiscal year.
 Senate Republicans want to approve the measure quickly, before the 2004 budget work begins
 early next month, but Democrats argue that they have barely had time to review the weighty
 document, which arrived on their desks midweek.

 Lawmakers said they did not know who was responsible for removing the Cuba language, but they
 noted that the change was made after the GOP took control of the Senate this year and wrote the
 omnibus spending bill. While Bush has never specifically threatened to veto legislation lifting the
 travel ban, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill sent a
 letter to House lawmakers in July during debate on the Treasury Department spending bill, urging
 them not to kill the ban and saying they would recommend that Bush veto the appropriations bill if it
 included such a provision.

 Spokesmen for the National Security Council, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the
 House and Senate majority leaders' offices did not return calls seeking an explanation for the
 change in the bill.

 ''The president has been very clear on where he stands on this issue, and the House leadership is in
 agreement with him,'' said Dennis K. Hayes, head of the anti-Castro Cuban-American National
 Foundation.

 © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.