BUSH ON FMA, PART TWO: From the New York Times

The White House sought on Sunday to reassure conservatives that President Bush would work hard on behalf of a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, backtracking from remarks Mr. Bush made in an interview suggesting that he would not press the Senate to vote on the amendment this year.

In an interview with The Washington Post published on Sunday, Mr. Bush said many senators did not see the need for the amendment as long as the law known as the Defense of Marriage Act was in place. Because many senators are waiting to see if that legislation can withstand a constitutional challenge, "nothing will happen" for now with the proposed amendment, Mr. Bush said. ...

In interviews on Sunday on television news programs, Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush's counselor, said Mr. Bush was referring in The Post interview only to the reality of legislative vote counting and was not suggesting that his support for the amendment had diminished.

"What the president was speaking to was some of the legislative realities in the United States Senate," Mr. Bartlett said. "As you know, it requires 67 votes in the United States Senate for a constitutional amendment to move forward. That's a very high bar. What we learned through the debate last year is that many members of the Senate believe that the Defense of Marriage Act first must be overturned or challenged before we take the next step of a constitutional amendment."

The president's statement in the interview with The Post, Mr. Bartlett said, "does not change President Bush's view about amendment, the need for an amendment. And he'll continue to push for an amendment."

Some of Mr. Bush's conservative allies on Capitol Hill said that they would keep pushing the issue and that they believed the president would be with them.

more
posted by Eve at 2:36 AM | link

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home