Washington ? Congress snuffed out Democratic opposition Thursday and approved a belated $373 billion bill financing most federal agencies and endorsing President Bush’s policies on overtime pay, food labeling, media ownership and guns.

Over protests by labor, some farm groups and conservatives angered by the measure’s mountain of pork-barrel projects, the Senate approved the bill by a bipartisan 65-28 vote. The House passed it in December.

The vote, on the first major bill that Congress has approved this election year, completes a measure that was due last Oct. 1, when the government’s budget year began.

Passage ended a prolonged fight in which the White House and GOP leaders stood by their gun-owner and business allies and refused to bend to Democrats and some Republicans in several fights.

Underscoring the bruising tone of those talks, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the episode taught him, “You do the best you can, and that compromise and negotiation is part of the legislative process.”

The 1,182-page bill provides increases for veterans’ health care, schools, biomedical research, highways and a drive to fight AIDS in poor African and Caribbean countries — though less than Democrats wanted.

It lets the administration go ahead with rules allowing companies to pay overtime to fewer white-collar workers and letting media companies own more television stations. It would create the first federal school vouchers and shorten the period the government keeps records on gun purchasers from 90 days to 24 hours.

The bill permits companies to wait until September 2006, rather than this September, to put country of origin labels on meat and many other foods sold in U.S. stores. Despite the Christmas season discovery of a Washington state cow with mad cow disease, the administration rebuffed demands by Democrats and some cattle-state Republicans to strip the delaying language.

“This bill is a good consensus,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. “It’s good for the country, and it will fund agencies that need the money now.”

But Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., condemned what he said was the administration’s take it or leave it attitude.

“This is one senator who’s going to leave it because of what it will do to working families and women and veterans of this country,” he said.

Election-year focus

Though defeated on Capitol Hill, Democrats said they would make those battles part of this fall’s presidential and congressional elections.

“These issues will not go away,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

Democrats succeeded Tuesday in blocking the Senate from finishing the bill. By Thursday, many of them decided it was time to capitulate and accept the bill’s spending increases and home-state projects. The pivotal vote on halting the delaying tactics was 61-32.

The measure has 7,932 projects for local items such as museum upgrades and agricultural research, at a cost of $10.7 billion, according to the conservative group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Voting to end the delays were 11 Democrats and two Republicans who were on the other side Tuesday, plus two other Democrats who missed Tuesday’s vote. Two Republicans who voted Tuesday to end debate were absent Thursday.

One lawmaker who switched, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said she backed halting the delays because the bill had money for veterans and “a lot of projects for Louisiana that mean jobs.”

As for overtime and other policies she opposes, “We can take care of that in the next election” by voting in Democrats, Landrieu said.

Had Democrats stalled the measure, Republican leaders threatened to replace it with a scaled-down bill financing programs at last year’s levels.

That would have been $6 billion less than the stalled legislation, with less money for the FBI and other anti-terrorism efforts, AIDS relief efforts and other programs. It was unclear whether GOP leaders would have won enough votes to prevail.

On to next year

Lawmakers will now focus on the $2.3 trillion budget for next year that Bush will propose in 10 days.

Previewing that blueprint, White House chief of staff Andrew Card told NBC News this week that Bush will propose limiting spending for nondefense, nondomestic security programs to less than 1 percent. That underlines an administration sensitivity to criticism by conservatives in and out of Congress for letting spending grow too quickly.

The measure approved Thursday melds seven spending bills into one, covering 11 Cabinet departments and scores of other agencies, plus foreign aid and the District of Columbia government. Six other spending measures, including those covering the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, were already enacted.

The bill’s passage will let Bush claim that he held expenditures in the 13 spending bills to just a 3 percent increase this year. But such spending has grown by an average 10.5 percent annually since he took office, and this year’s total could still swell for war or other unanticipated needs in the coming months.