House GOP Spending Victory

House Republicans moved another step toward an inevitable budget showdown with President Clinton, passing and sending to the Senate the last and largest spending bill of the year in the face of a certain veto, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Bill Plante.

The spending measure, approved on a near party-line 218-211 vote, also carried a 0.97 percent across-the-board cut in federal agencies' budgets, which Mr. Clinton has said he would not accept. Senate passage was expected early next week.

"We're going to have to work together to get a budget that works," Mr. Clinton said. "All this sort of smoke and mirrors that they have been doing and claiming that we and the Democrats were trying to spend the social security surplus when they were spending it all along is not helpful."

This was the last of the 13 spending bills needed to fund the government in fiscal 2000, which began Oct. 1. Congress already has passed and Mr. Clinton has signed two short-term measures that have kept the government running nearly a month into the new year.

But neither the Republican-led Congress nor the president was ready to let the budget fight produce a federal shutdown.

So Congress on Thursday also sent Mr. Clinton a measure letting federal agencies function through Nov. 5 as the two sides work through their differences.

Picking his own battles, the president acknowledged what has been a political fact in Washington for many weeks: That his proposals to extend the solvency of Medicare and Social Security, and create a new Medicare prescription drug benefit, would have to wait until next year.

House Republicans, meanwhile, celebrated a near party line passage of the final spending bill.

Meanwhile, Mr. Clinton is expected to issue an executive order limiting the dissemination of a person's most private and sensitive medical information. Under the new edict, no patient information can be released without consent.

"I will use the full authority of this office to create the first comprehensive national standards for the protection of medical records," Mr. Clinton said.