The House of Representatives dealt a striking blow to proponents of human cloning on Tuesday. By a bipartisan vote of 265 to 162, the House voted to ban practices that involve the genetic replication of human embryos.
Some supporters of the legislation hinted that its passage had implications for the government's approach to another controversial issue: federal funding of stem cell research.
"It [the bill] clearly sends a message that there is a place we don't want to go, and that is the manufacture of scientific embryos for research," Congressman Dave Wedon, R-FL, the bill's primary sponsor, told The New York Times.
President Bush, who has yet to announce his position on the federal financing of stem cell research, supported the human cloning ban and praised the House vote.
The current tide against the cloning of embryos does not necessarily spell disaster for government funding of stem cell research. Future federal regulations could stipulate that the research, which involves the extraction of stem cells from human embryos, utilize only embryos discarded by fertility clinics rather than genetically replicated embryos -- a practice more palatable to those made uneasy by the idea of human cloning.
Democrats and Republicans reached another point of consensus this week. The President announced yesterday that a compromise has been reached between himself and those supporting the House Democrats' version of a patient's bill of rights.
The announcement came after talks yesterday between Bush and Congressman Charles Norwood, R-GA, who, in recent years, has worked closely with Democrats on patients' rights legislation.
The new resolution will protect patients' rights without encouraging "frivolous lawsuits," Bush said at a press conference yesterday afternoon.
The possibility that patients' rights legislation backed by Democrats in both chambers of Congress (and already passed in the Senate) would promote "frivolous lawsuits" was a significant sticking point for Bush during the past few weeks of debate over the bill. The President has met with Norwood several times in an attempt to work through the issue.
Yesterday, the talks finally proved successful. GOP lawmakers now reportedly hope to push the legislation through the House today before Congress is adjourned for a month-long vacation.
The Teamsters union wants to force Mexican trucking companies to take a permanent vacation from work in the United States. The union, which counts a substantial number of truckers among its 1.4 million-strong membership, is leading a lobbying campaign to keep Mexican trucks out of the U.S., citing the danger that the trucks -- which fail safety inspections at higher rates than U.S. trucks -- bring to the road.
The campaign undermines the Presidents' hopes to improve diplomatic and commercial ties with Mexico, which called for the opening of the American border to Mexican trucks under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The Teamsters union has long opposed the eight-year old agreement because of its potential to negatively impact the American workforce.
