They held a similar event earlier in the year when Congress approved another high-profile bill that faced a veto, a measure containing a timetable for a troop withdrawal from Iraq.
Mr. Bush vetoed that bill on May 1, and as expected, the House failed to override his veto.
The House approved an initial stem cell measure within days of convening on a 253-174 vote that was short of a veto-proof majority. The Senate passed a slightly different measure in April, 63-34. The House needed to vote on the bill again to send it to the president.
There was no federal money for embryonic stem cell research until Mr. Bush announced on Aug. 9, 2001, that his administration would make it available for lines of stem cells that already were in existence. Elected with the strong support of abortion foes and other conservatives, he said at the time his decision was designed to balance concerns about "protecting life and improving life."
He also limited the funds to cell lines derived from embryos that were surplus at fertility clinics, and that had been donated from adults who had given informed consent.
Advocates of the veto-threatened legislation argue that the number of stem cell lines available for research is smaller than needed, and that some of the material has become contaminated over time by mouse embryonic skin cells that typically are placed at the bottom of culture dishes used in the research.
With new research and legislation, the stem cell debate evolves
Separately, three teams of researchers reported Wednesday they had found a way to produce embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos -- but in mice. They got ordinary skin cells to act like the embryonic cells, which can develop into all types of tissue.
In a prelude to the stem cell vote in Congress, House Republicans engineered the defeat of legislation to ban human reproductive cloning. The 213-204 vote against the measure was well short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
Critics said it would facilitate the creation of cloned human embryos to be used in research and then destroyed.
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