"I don't see how you could possibly justify that as a choice provision".
But an amendment by Ms. Norton to strike the $10 million choice provision died on a 203-to-203 vote.
"This is something new," said Stanley Carlson-Thies, who helped develop the charitable-choice provision and now works in the White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the powerful chairman of the Appropriations Committee, criticized a school choice provision requiring districts to allow students from schools with low test scores to transfer to better schools, at the district's expense.
One reason for the action now is that after five years of reducing the welfare rolls, states are finally able to turn their attention to the law's charitable choice provision.
Dr. Paige later visited a public school on remote St. Lawrence Island, where enforcing the law's choice provision would require flying students to another school 164 miles across the Bering Sea.
He was the architect of the charitable-choice provision of the 1996 welfare overhaul bill, which channeled increased government money to religious groups and congregations to help the needy.
"The Arizona act violates the freedom of choice provision of the Medicaid Act precisely because every Medicaid beneficiary has the right to select any qualified health care provider," Judge Wake ruled in a decision released on Friday.
Planned Parenthood of Indiana and two of its patients have filed suit in Federal District Court in Indianapolis, challenging the new restrictions as "a blatant violation of the 'freedom of choice' provision" of federal law.
Last year, in a bid to win Senate passage of the measure, President Bush agreed to drop another contentious element, the "charitable choice" provision, which would have let religious groups favor members of their own faith in hiring and ignore antidiscrimination laws.
