The partisan clash over federal spending escalated Wednesday, as Senate Republicans united to split a massive bill that would have funded an array of domestic programs for veterans, military construction, education and health research.

Successfully employing a rule revised by the new ethics law, Republicans killed $65 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and for military construction operations. That language had been added in bicameral conference negotiations over a bill providing $151 billion in discretionary funds to the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS) and Education.

None of the Senate’s presidential candidates were present for the votes. Ten Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to clear the bill.

The votes come at a crucial time in the most heated battle over federal spending since the standoff between the Clinton administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in 1995. Most important, they signaled that Democrats will have a tough time packaging together multiple appropriations bills into one big measure, a practice that previous Republican-controlled Congresses regularly employed.

Instead, Democrats could be forced to send each of the 12 annual bills individually to Bush’s desk. But that task is daunting, given the limited legislative days left this year and Bush’s vow to veto any measure that exceeds his request.

Both sides are gambling that voters won’t blame them for blocking funds for veterans, and both are eager for the larger funding battle. Republicans say it plays into their theme of Democrats mismanaging the historic opportunity voters handed them in the 2006 elections.

“The American people may have had a referendum on the Iraq war, but what they got was the party of taxation, regulation and litigation,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday. “And they are busily at work, every day, proving my point.”

But Democrats note their razor-thin majority in Congress and say Republicans have gone to extraordinary lengths to block their agenda, which is in touch with the needs of the American public. With a new president and more Senate seats, Democrats argue, they can reach the 60 votes needed to push bills through the upper chamber.

“Even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched our VA to its breaking point and the number of uninsured veterans has skyrocketed, President Bush and Republican senators are saying we must choose between supporting our veterans and taking care of other health and education needs of Americans,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said. “In asking us to make this false choice, they are demonstrating a failure of leadership. We can and must do better.”

Republicans contend that Democrats could send the veterans’ bill to the president’s desk by Veterans Day, on Nov. 12, if Democrats separated the two bills. Bush has vowed to veto the Labor-HHS-Education bill, which would add $10 billion to his proposal. He has not threatened a veto on the Veterans Affairs measure, however, even though it is about $4 billion more than his request.

In a twist, the fact that senators removed the Veterans Affairs measure was largely the making of the Democratic-controlled Congress.

 Earlier this year, Democrats made changes to a Senate rule after complaining that Republicans had abused conference committees when they were in control by dropping in unrelated provisions during the penultimate stage of the legislative process. The Senate changed the rule to allow members to object to individual provisions in a conference report rather than the overall measure.

Under the law, if a point of order under Senate Rule 28 is sustained, language airdropped in during the conference committee is struck, and the bill without the offending language is sent back to the House. Before the law, sustaining a point of order would essentially kill the bill. The Veterans Affairs bill was attached to the Labor-HHS-Education bill during conference.