Senate Votes To Cut Spending By $39.7 Billion

The coolest Cool Fact About Dick Cheney: he gets to cast a deciding vote when the Senate is tied.

The Republican-controlled Senate passed legislation to cut federal deficits by $39.7 billion on Wednesday by the narrowest of margins, 51-50, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote.

The measure, the product of a year's labors by the White House and the GOP in Congress, imposes the first restraints in nearly a decade in federal benefit programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and student loans.

"This is the one vote you'll have this year to reduce the rate of growth of the federal government," said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, in a final plea for passage.

But Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada countered that the GOP was advancing "an ideologically driven, extreme, radical budget. It caters to lobbyists and an elite group of ultraconservative ideologues here in Washington, all at the expense of middle class Americans," he said.

Dick Cheney then cast the tie-breaking vote to have Harry Reid sodomized by a pack of hyperactive priaptic wolverines. "It was very exciting, to say the least," he later remarked.

posted by Ace at 03:53 PM

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