Feingold sets back Bush over budget amendment By Sarita Chourey News-Chronicle WASHINGTON - With war in Iraq starting last week, tours of the Capitol have been restricted to those arranged through a member of Congress' office. Capitol Police officers have been put on 12-hour shifts, and security officials have implemented a policy in which all visitors who enter the Senate Gallery must first have their names entered into a computer database. But the latest security upgrades and the bombing in the Middle East are not preventing Congress from proceeding with its legislative business or tackling issues as far-removed from international terrorism as child abduction. Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner's, R-Menomonee Falls, AMBER Alert bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, and is expected to come before the full House for a vote sometime this week. Though he enjoyed an early victory last week, Sensenbrenner's fight to pass his amendments is just beginning. His bill easily passed the full House last year, but was not brought up for a vote by the Senate. Among Sensenbrenner's amendments are measures to eliminate the statute of limitations on child abductions and sex crimes and deny pretrial release for child rapists and abductors. Critics predict that the bill, which is laden with Sensenbrenner's controversial amendments, will get held up in a House-Senate negotiating committee for months instead of moving speedily to President Bush's desk. And many expect the bill to ultimately die. Both Wisconsin Sens. Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl voted for the stand-alone Senate bill that passed the Senate in January, which called for an AMBER Alert communications network, and did not include any amendments similar to Sensenbrenner's. Rep. Mark Green, R-Green Bay, and other proponents of the Sensenbrenner's bill and its amendments, say the original, basic version of the bill passed by the Senate earlier does nothing additional to protect children. ______________ Feingold reaped a huge victory Friday when the Senate voted 52-47 in favor of his amendment to the budget resolution that would create a reserve fund of up to $100 billion to pay for military action and reconstruction in Iraq. The passage of Feingold's amendment is the first substantial set back to the President's budget. The $100 billion would come out of President Bush's $726 million in tax cuts. "We cannot blithely go along as if this were a time for business as usual," Feingold said when he introduced the measure. "We should prepare responsibly for what is happening right before our eyes." Early Friday morning, the House passed, by a three-vote margin, a $2.2 trillion FY04 budget, which left the president's entire $726 billion tax cut perfectly intact. House moderates who helped pass the bill did so with the hope that negotiations between the House and Senate will produce a version more to their liking. Feingold's amendment is the first such modification likely to appease House moderates. Democratic Reps. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, and Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, who are on the House Budget Committee, had protested the GOP budget by voting against it in committee and again Friday morning in the full House vote. Kind said Friday, "The budget passed last night that I voted against short-changes education, health care and veterans services to pay for a tax cut that benefits the wealthy - and in fact doesn't include one penny to pay for the cost of the war in Iraq." On the floor Thursday night, Baldwin said, "(Republicans') number one priority in this budget is making room for $1.35 trillion in tax cuts that will benefit the wealthiest Americans." Chourey is WisPolitics.com's Washington correspondent. She works for The Hill, a weekly newspaper that covers Congress. Her column appears here Mondays.