WASHINGTON (By Tom Curry, MSNBC) July 14, 2006 — Nancy Reagan supports federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. So does Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. So do 50 House Republicans.

Last year the House passed a bill to permit federal funding.

But President Bush is against it, and when the Senate votes next Tuesday on the House-passed bill, it will do so in the face of a likely veto.

The House passed the funding bill last year by a vote of 238 to 194, well short of the two-thirds needed to over-ride a veto.

Some Democrats gleefully predict that the veto will boost their chances in November elections.

Electoral gains for Democrats?

Sen. Charles Schumer, D- N.Y., the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Tuesday that surveys show significant voter movement to the Democrats due to the stem cell issue. Many scientists say that use of cells derived from embryos offers hope of finding treatments for Parkinson's disease and other ailments.

“Protestant non-evangelical Republicans” are shifting, Schumer told reporters. “The elder in the Presbyterian church in the suburbs of Cincinnati,” Schumer said with precise specificity, naming his electoral target. “There’s a feeling among more affluent Republicans of uncomfortable-ness with where the Republican Party is headed.”

Such voters, Schumer said, “don’t like Schiavo,” a reference to congressional intervention last year in the case of the disabled Florida woman Terri Schiavo. “And they don’t like creationism being taught in the public schools, and they sure don’t like blocking stem cell research. It’s an issue that affects lots of swing voter Republicans who will move to the Democratic side…. When they know somebody who says, ‘My daughter could be blind by age 20, please allow stem cell research,’ they don’t see why not.”

Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, disputed Schumer, saying, federal funding of embryonic stem cell research "is not going to be a top-tier issue in any (House) campaign. For moderate Republican voters, this is not going to be a more salient issue than taxes or illegal immigration."

Bush says he opposes taxpayer funding because embryonic stem cell research entails the destruction of human life.

The administration policy is to permit taxpayer funding of research on stem cell lines created as of Aug. 9, 2001, or prior to that date, but no taxpayer funding for the use of stem cell lines derived from newly destroyed embryos after that date.

Advocates scrutinize the votes

Non-partisan advocacy groups are taking a role in the buildup for next week’s Senate action and will remind the electorate in November how incumbents voted.

“We fully expect to hold accountable the politicians who oppose this,” said John Hlinko, founder of StemPac, an advocacy group which calls for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Hlinko said pro-stem cell funding advocates will be watching closely the exact number of senators who vote for the House-passed bill. “If we get 69 or 70 senators it will be not just veto-proof, but overwhelming, telling President Bush it has huge support and there’s a cost in opposing it.”

The Senate will also vote Tuesday on two other bills, one to outlaw “fetal farming” or donation of fetal tissue if a pregnancy was initiated only to provide such tissue and another to promote federally-funded research on the therapeutic potential of adult stem cells.

Sen. Rick Santorum, R –Pa., who opposes the House-passed bill, has co-sponsored the two alternative bills, and predicted that Bush will sign them into law.

But Sean Tipton, of a group called The Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, derided the adult stem cell bill as “clearly a political fig leaf.” He said, “Only a vote for H.R. 810, (the House-passed bill), is pro-patient and pro-research.”

Where Santorum stands

Santorum, locked in a tough race with Democrat Bob Casey, said the principle at stake is that “once life is created, it should be protected. In a world in which there’s a lot of gray, this is an area which deserves very clear protections for human life.”

Santorum accused Casey of being “somewhat obtuse” and “rather unclear” on the Senate bill.

But Casey spokesman Larry Smar said Casey “has been very clear about this issue” — he opposes federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that goes beyond the current administration parameters.

As Casey’s stance indicates, there’s no party unanimity on this issue among Democrats. Nor is there among Republicans.

Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Arkansas, said Wednesday he’s still mulling over his vote.

“I have questions about the ethical parameters, I just want to make sure I’m comfortable with the medical-ethics parameters,” Pryor said.

Sen. Ben Nelson, D- Neb., as he often does, departs from the majority of Democrats by opposing embryonic stem cell funding. He said he’s intrigued by the possibility that there may be a way of extracting stem cells from embryos without damaging the embryo. But he said until scientists figure out how to do that, he’ll oppose federal funding.

Nelson is up for re-election this November in a state which is predominantly Republican.

Sen. Gordon Smith, R- Ore., a supporter of funding embryonic stem cell research, told reporters the House bill might get more than 67 votes in the Senate Tuesday. He said Bush decision about a veto might be influenced by a high number of Senate votes, “that’s one of the reasons we’re whipping so hard to get over 67.”

An opponent of funding embryonic stem cell research, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., said he can’t imagine Bush not vetoing the bill. Brownback speculated that some senators may feel free to vote for the bill knowing that Bush will veto it. “A number of senators may look at it as, ‘Let’s let the president carry this one so I don’t have to carry it.”

Republicans at risk?

The 50 House GOP members who voted for federal funding include five who are in what the non-partisan Cook Political Report rates as “toss up” races: Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania, Clay Shaw of Florida, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays of Connecticut, and Heather Wilson of New Mexico.

These members can argue that they voted their conscience and weren’t shy about opposing their party’s president. Their Democratic opponents can argue that it is their own Republican president who is blocking the will of Congress and they were powerless to persuade him.

In the case of some Democratic House candidates who are running against GOP incumbents who voted against stem cell funding, they, too, oppose such funding.

Case in point: Rep John Hostettler, R-Ind. Analysts see Hostettler’s battle against Democrat Brad Ellsworth as a toss up.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee slams Hostettler on its web site, saying he “sided with social conservatives against patients with debilitating diseases and voted against expanding federal funding of stem cell research.”

But Ellsworth’s spokesman, Jay Howser, said Ellsworth would have voted ‘no’ on funding just as Hostettler did.

Coleman proposes a compromise

Meanwhile at least one senator is seeking a middle ground that both sides could support.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R- Minn., who is up for re-election in 2008, said Wednesday he’ll vote against the House bill.

Next week’s vote, Coleman said, will be merely “a symbolic vote, because in the end nothing is going to happen, there’s going to be no moving the science forward.”

The House bill “will pass in the Senate, the president will veto it, the veto will be sustained in the House, and then maybe we can come up with another approach,” Coleman predicted.

“I’m pro-life, but I also want to be pro-science,” he said. “What I would do is take the line the president drew (Aug. 9, 2001) and move that line to today. There are hundreds of lines of stem cells already out there. You don’t have to spend a dime on the destruction of the human embryo.”