On 16 June, the bill was just barely approved with a 217-203 vote in the House.
Two years ago, Ford workers barely approved a series of cuts in health care benefits that G.M. workers voted to accept.
John Haley, who was appointed to succeed Mr. Wilson as transportation commissioner, had barely approved the document when there was a major change.
He noted that two decades ago in Ireland's last tortuous vote challenging a benchmark Catholic teaching, voters barely approved divorce — but only because heavy rain deterred voters in the then-conservative west.
And Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican in Democratic-leaning Wisconsin, has managed to maintain a net positive job approval rating, but just barely: 50 percent approve to 46 percent disapprove.
Since breastfeeding my own children and then subsequently realizing that the early building blocks of my own life were barely FDA approved, I've often wondered just how safe soy protein isolate and other formula additives really are.
She made Thinx infamous with an ad campaign in New York City subways that used visuals of grapefruit and raw egg to represent menstruation; it barely got approved by the M.T.A. (More recently, after the birth of her son, she made a splash at Burning Man by pumping breast milk and sharing it with fellow-festivalgoers).
Legislators were barely able to approve the tax package that has already foundered.
That night, as a barely elected government approved the effective privatisation of the British university system, thousands of students and school pupils were kettled for hours in the freezing cold, some hospitalised with broken bones and head injuries after being charged by police horses.
In response to those who thought it should have been larger, Mr. Obama cogently declared it a "bit rich" to blame Summers for the stimulus's not being larger when Congress could barely haul itself together to approve the roughly $800 billion measure.
