Kemp Warns GOP on Heavy Deficit Cuts : Fears Party Could Be Torn Apart; Leaders List Policy Objectives

Conservative Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), reflecting a split among Republicans as they try to reconcile their political and economic goals, warned Monday that congressional Republicans risk their own party’s future by taking the lead on deficit reduction and championing the hard choices it requires.

Kemp, a leading proponent of the “supply-side” economic theory emphasizing growth over deficit control, indirectly criticized deficit-conscious Senate Republicans by saying: “Mine is not a monomaniacal approach.”

“What is so sacrosanct about $50 billion in deficit reduction?” he asked, referring to a goal of Senate Republicans. “We should not tear our party apart on this issue. . . . I don’t share the crisis atmosphere.”

Policy Recommendations

Kemp made his remarks at a news conference where leaders of the House Republican minority released more than 250 policy recommendations for the first 100 days of the second Reagan Administration.

House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) said House Republicans “haven’t really come to any firm conclusion” about a proposal by Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) for a one-year freeze on Social Security cost-of-living increases. While Michel noted that President Reagan has asked Republicans to keep Social Security “off limits” as they cut spending, he said that a budget freeze has “bipartisan, broad-scale support here in the Congress.”

“Once you begin making exceptions, however, to the total freeze, it opens itself up to other exceptions--and then the whole concept before long goes down,” Michel said.

Outside Budget Process

But Kemp said that Social Security should be kept “outside this budget process.”

California Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Highland), chairman of the group that drafted the report, described the recommendations as “a road map . . . a pretty good outline of Republican thinking.”

The proposals generally supported Reagan’s positions on a range of controversial issues that included deployment of the MX missile and immigration reform.

Other suggestions included requiring two-thirds congressional approval, rather than a simple majority, on spending bills; giving the President a line-item veto of spending items; making the secretary of the Treasury an ex officio member of the Federal Reserve Board, and streamlining nuclear power plant licensing.

However, the Republican recommendations--titled “Ideas for Tomorrow, Choices for Today”--are more moderate than last summer’s Republican national platform and do not raise such moral topics as abortion.

Michel said the congressional proposals have a different tone from the platform because they were drafted by elected officials and “none of these were just dreaming off the walls.”

Lewis acknowledged that some of the recommendations are contradictory. For example, while the Republicans advocated a “flattened” tax system--one with fewer deductions--they also included among their proposals more than a dozen types of new tax breaks for various purposes, including hiring displaced homemakers, private school tuition, enterprise zones and worker training.

Lewis said the Republicans would prefer a flatter tax but believe the tax breaks they propose would improve the current system until Congress undertakes major tax reform.