From Bob Novak's weekly review of the nation's politics:Stem-Cell Debate: Senate Democrats are expected to fall short as they seek a veto-proof majority in the Senate to fund scientific experiments on embryos left over from in-vitro fertilization. President Bush has explicitly forbidden the use of federal funds to do experiments that involve killing new human embryos, so the bill's effect is to nullify a presidential policy. Therefore, a veto is certain.
The embryos, which can be killed for their stem cells, are expected by some to produce treatments and cures for certain diseases. Pro-life members of Congress managed to prevent the measure from receiving super-majority support in the last Congress, even as it passed both houses. Bush's veto -- his first ever -- was sustained.
This year, the numbers are especially different in the Senate, where 66 votes exist to fund the research. The required 67 votes would be there, but for the absence of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), whose illness has kept him away from the Senate all year. The House, however, has already passed such a funding bill by a margin nowhere near the two-thirds needed to override President Bush's certain veto. Democrats are burning time on this issue only for political purposes.
Democrats see a political opening with the stem-cell issue. Still, as the narrow success last year (largely due to the help of a misleading advertising campaign) of an embryonic-research ballot proposition in Missouri demonstrated, it is not necessarily as good an issue as they would hope. Instead of helping Democratic candidates over the finish line, as it was supposed to, the state's Proposition B (which established a right to clone human embryos for experiments) barely survived on the back of a strong Democratic turnout in a strong Democratic year.
Possibly critical to this debate, and almost completely unnoticed, was the move last week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate certain "broad" patents on embryonic stem-cell lines. These had allowed a small number of stakeholders to profit from royalties every time embryonic stem-cells were isolated and preserved. This decision, if upheld on appeal, may in the short run make embryonic stem-cell research cheaper. But in the long run, it threatens to undercut much of the financial support for initiatives backing large government donations to the embryonic stem-cell business. Private funding has been hard to come by, because the research is highly speculative.
