WASHINGTON (ABP) — The man spearheading President Bush's effort to increase government grants to religious social-service agencies said the initiative will continue in Bush's second term, although he offered few specifics as to how that will happen.
Speaking during a Washington conference on Bush's program, Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said the president interprets his Nov. 2 re-election as a public endorsement of the plan.
“As he looks at his second term, President Bush is not only looking at his general priorities, but is renewing his commitment to the faith-based initiative,” Towey said. “He very clearly staked out where he stood, and the majority of Americans supported that.”
Towey was vague about what Bush could do in his second term to further expand the initiative. Although Bush was unable to pass the plan through Congress as a whole in his first term, he instituted many of the changes required to increase funding for churches and other faith-based groups piecemeal — via administrative rule changes in the various agencies that administer federal social-service grants.
“The president will continue to look at what are his tools as chief executive, what other executive actions he can take,” Towey said.
Although Congress became slightly more Republican in the elections, observers of the faith-based controversy said it was still unlikely that Bush can pass any sweeping faith-based plans through the Senate.
“I think we will not have enough votes to kill the president's initiatives in the House, but even in the new Senate, I think we still have enough votes to stop it,” said Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Texas), one of Congress' most outspoken supporters of church-state separation.
Towey said efforts to oppose faith-based initiatives in the federal courts will continue. Even though a broad challenge to the initiative as a whole was recently dismissed by a federal judge, several other federal lawsuits challenging social-service programs funded under the faith-based plan have been resolved in favor of the plaintiffs or are pending.
“I think this will continue to be opposed,” Towey said. “Quite frankly, I think you will continue to see great opposition, because I think that there will be a continued outcry from the secular extremists.”
Edwards, who spoke after Towey, took umbrage with that description. “I'm a little bit bothered by his reference to 'secular extremists,'” said the congressman, who is active at Baptist churches near his district home of Waco, Texas, and his suburban Washington home. “This issue is too important for either side or any side to fall back into the temptation of name-calling.”