WASHINGTON: President George Bush may have lost a veto battle last week on a water projects bill, but Republican allies in Congress are sticking with him in another, bigger veto showdown over government spending.

Democrats are struggling to draw up a playbook to finish this year’s spending bills for Cabinet departments, the most basic job of Congress. While the new budget year began Oct 1, Democrats have completed action on just two bills — funding defence and health and education programmes.

Some of the Democrats’ early decisions have appeared to cede even more leverage to Bush, while internal divisions within the party have contributed to the delays in getting bills finished and sent to the White House.

On three votes last week, House and Senate Republicans stood with Bush to demonstrate they will sustain his looming veto of the health and education spending bill, a top Democratic priority.

As Republicans learned so painfully when Democratic President Bill Clinton used veto after veto to beat them during the 1990s, the veto pen is the ultimate weapon in legislative warfare. And its power is especially potent in situations like the present, which deals with spending bills for agency budgets that lawmakers are eager to pass.

Clinton used vetoes to protect domestic programs for education, health care and welfare from Republican cuts in the early days of Republican control. Later, when a budget surplus appeared, he extracted big spending increases for education and other domestic programmes.

Bush, on the other hand, is using veto threats to cut back the Democrats’ spending, trying to force Congress to stick to his budget cap for the one-third of the budget covered by the 12 annual appropriations bills.

There is plenty of political subtext as well.

Republicans are still steaming from last year’s elections, when many of their core supporters faulted them for losing their way on spending and giving up their right to paint themselves as the party of fiscal discipline and limited government.

The ongoing clash is part of a plan to get the Republican Party’s fiscal conservatism ‘brand’ back.

Bush has requested $933 billion in overall spending for the government departments and agencies for fiscal 2008, and has vowed to veto any legislation that spends more, with the exception of about $4 billion for veterans programmes.

But Democrats want to add $23 billion for domestic programmes. Old-fashioned deal-making would have the combatants split their differences. Instead, Bush and congressional Republicans are turning the screws on Democrats.

“The president has made it very clear that the top line is the top line,” House Minority Leader John Boehner, a Republican, said on Friday. “The size of the pie is set. The slices he’s willing to work with them on.”

Top lawmakers like House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, a Democrat, appear to be taking Bush at his word. Obey was in the middle of the battles of the 1990s, helping Clinton extract concessions with veto threats, and he is well aware of Bush’s advantages.

“Yes, he used his veto, but Clinton never said he wouldn’t negotiate. Clinton never said it was my way or the highway,” Obey said. “The difference is Bush is saying, ‘Take it or leave it.’”

Some Democrats — and more than a few Republicans — hope that Bush will soften. Maybe after Bush gets a few vetoes out of his system, he will be ready to negotiate, or so the thinking goes.

Some Republicans acknowledge much of Bush’s budget is unrealistic — with cuts to health research, education and popular water and sewer projects just for starters — and they’re almost as eager to see negotiations as Democrats are.

But in a move that left some Congress-watchers scratching their heads, Democrats have given up much of what leverage they had by sending Bush the only spending bill he really seems to care about, a $471 billion budget for the Pentagon. There had been speculation they would hold the measure in reserve to try to force the White House to negotiate, but with that bill in hand, Bush is free to play hardball on the rest.—AP