WASHINGTON – The Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to reject restrictions President Bush has placed on federally funded embryonic stem-cell research. Bush plans to veto the bill, but his restrictions are unlikely to last for long after his presidency.
The candidates running to succeed Bush largely endorse federally supported stem-cell research. That support, coupled with the backing of a majority of Americans, means change is almost certain.
“The war is basically won, the policy is going to be updated, it’s just a matter of when,” said Lawrence Soler, a vice president at the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, which lobbies for embryonic stem-cell research.
Bush has cast stem-cell research as a moral issue intimately connected to the question of when life begins, a question that echoed throughout the second day of Senate debate. Bush used the only veto of his career to overturn a similar bill last year.
“I believe this will encourage taxpayer money to be spent on the destruction or endangerment of living human embryos,” Bush said in a statement.
The conservative groups and religious right that make up Bush’s base praised his stand and said lawmakers must be educated to understand the potential of alternatives.
“In two years, we could have such significant breakthroughs this is no longer an issue,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “It becomes harder and harder to argue with science and the success is in the area of adult stem cells.”
But the majority of leading Democratic and Republican candidates support research on embryonic stem cells.
Former Sen. John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat, strongly supports the research, while Democratic hopefuls Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., co-sponsored the Senate bill that would expand the number of embryonic stem-cell lines eligible for federally funded research.
That bill, known as the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, or S5, passed 63-34, winning the same number of favorable votes as a similar bill last year. Sixty-seven votes are needed to overturn a presidential veto. The House passed its version of the bill in January, 253-174, also short of the votes to override a veto.
Candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., supports expanded funding for embryonic stem-cell research, as long as embryos are not intentionally created for research.
Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican who has few fans among conservatives for his support for abortion, has taken a fuzzy position. His spokeswoman Maria Comella said Giuliani thinks “we need to take advantage of new technology, while at the same time need to be respectful of human life.” She refused to provide further details.
Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, supported embryonic stem-cell research before 2005, but now strikes a balance. He still supports research with cells that would otherwise be discarded by fertility clinics, but he opposes federal funding for that work. And like McCain, he opposes the creation of embryos for the purposes of research.
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