It was a rare pairing, indeed, last week when U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., sided with President Bush.

The issue was not the war in Iraq, of course. It was water resources - $23.2 billion in appropriations for water resources projects across the nation. The Water Resources Development Act includes a project to build a permanent electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal just south of Chicago to bolster efforts to keep the Asian carp from migrating from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes system.

But where we see the threat of carp and the endangerment of the Great Lakes fishery, Bush and Feingold both saw pork.

In vetoing the bill, President Bush noted that House and Senate negotiators had ballooned the price tag of the legislation by $9 billion. "This bill promises hundreds of earmarks and hinders the Corps' (of Engineers) ability to fulfill the nation's critical water resources needs," Bush said.

The House quickly overrode the veto and the Senate followed on Thursday to override with a 79-14 vote - with Sen. Feingold among the 14 dissenters. He said Bush's veto was a chance for Congress to "modify the flawed, bloated bill."

We're no fans of the river of pork that annually flows out of Washington, D.C., and, truth be told, we would have been very happy with a separate bill to try to blunt the spread of the Asian carp which would add another invasive species threat to the sport fishing on the Great Lakes.

We have no doubt that some of the 900 projects in this act deserve further scrutiny and we would hope that they get it when they move through the appropriations process. There are some good things in this bill as well and we would count $20 million in cleanup funds for the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair and $35 million to correct sewer overflows in the state of Michigan among them.

It has been almost eight years since Congress has adopted a water bill and this one is overdue. The carp are sitting south of Chicago just waiting for a chance to make the final jump into the Great Lakes and we can't afford to wait on construction of a permanent defense barrier to at least try to stop them. Nor can sewer overflow fix-ups be put off, allowing cities to continue to pollute our Great Lakes resource.

If there is fat in this bill, Congress should trim it in the weeks ahead, but there should be no more delays on projects necessary to protect our waters.