Washington — Consideration of a major spending bill to increase funds for student aid and biomedical research was delayed indefinitely today because of partisan fighting in the U.S. House of Representatives on an unrelated issue.

The House Committee on Appropriations had been poised to approve the bill, for the 2009 fiscal year, when Republicans offered a motion to strip out all of the bill’s language and replace it with unrelated provisions, including one authorizing an expansion of oil drilling in the United States. The Republicans have been pushing that proposal as part of their argument, which has strong political resonance in this election year, that Congress’s Democratic leadership has not done enough to bring down soaring gasoline prices.

The move incensed the committee’s chairman, Rep. David R. Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who called it “a political stunt” of a type that explains why Americans “despise” Congress.

Democrats then moved to adjourn the session, which the committee approved only after Republicans demanded a roll-call vote.

The breakdown came only a day after Democrats and Republicans on the committee spent a good part of a separate meeting praising the panel’s spirit of bipartisan cooperation and lavishing praise on members from the opposite parties who had previously announced they would not run for re-election in November. But that was yesterday.

Last week an Appropriations subcommittee had approved the bill, which would raise the maximum Pell Grant to $4,900 and increase the National Institutes of Health’s budget by $1.2-billion, or about 4 percent. If the full committee resumes consideration and gives its approval, the bill would go next to the full House of Representatives for a vote. But approval may not come soon: Congress has a busy agenda before it adjourns at the end of July for a monthlong recess. —Jeffrey Brainard