WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush began pushing his "faith-based initiative" in his second week in office, but nearly two years later, Congress is leaving town without sending him a bill.
The president has not yet decided whether to try to act on the divisive issue again next year, said Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Supporters couldn't get even a watered-down version of the initiative through the Senate despite presidential pleas and a last-ditch effort this week.
"The president is looking at all his options," Towey said Friday. "He's as committed to this as he's ever been."
Those options include administrative action to open government social service programs to religious groups. The administration has already been considering how it can act alone to change rules that have kept religious groups from competing for various grants.
"We're now going to leave the exploration phase and start the implementation phase," Towey said.
Supporters say they had the votes to move their bill through the Senate this week, but they couldn't get the unanimous agreement needed to move ahead in this Congress' final days.
As conceived, the Bush legislation would have opened a dozen new social programs to religious groups, who supporters say are often best suited to offer help. But after a bitterly partisan debate in the House, where Bush's plan was approved with few changes, Senate supporters led by Sens. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., massively scaled back their version.
The Senate bill offered tax breaks to encourage charitable giving and made it clear that religious groups cannot be excluded from government contracts for superficial reasons, such as a religious name or religious symbols on display. It also added more than $1 billion to the Social Services Block Grant program, a favorite of Democrats.
The effort got a boost last month when the chief House sponsor said he would go along with the scaled-back version in order to get something to the president.
But some Senate Democrats objected that the bill is neutral on sticky church-state issues. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., argued that it should specifically bar proselytization with government money and prohibit groups getting tax dollars from discriminating against beneficiaries or employees of other religions. Without this clarification, he said, the Bush administration would interpret the law on its own to allow this.
These same issues were at the heart of the House debate, and Senate sponsors had hoped to avoid another fight. Reed wanted to offer four amendments; after rounding up enough votes to defeat them, sponsors said OK.
The bill came to the Senate floor Thursday, with an hour set aside for debate on each of Reed's amendments. But Senate rules required unanimous agreement to move ahead, and there were objections from Reed and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. They complained that one hour per amendment wasn't enough time to debate such important matters.
Towey said the administration is very disappointed.
"Lieberman and Santorum designed the legislation expressly to avoid the very fight that the two senators yesterday wanted to pick," he said. "This bill was not going to move forward because these senators were not going to let it happen."