GOP Senators Rap Reagan on Budget Deal With House

Outraged Republican senators, saying they went out on a political limb in the name of deficit reduction, Thursday blasted President Reagan’s decision to abandon their proposed freeze on Social Security benefits in favor of striking a budget deal with the House.

“If the President can’t support us, he ought to keep his mouth shut,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said.

Added Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.): “People feel they flew a kamikaze mission and ended up in flames and got nothing for it.”

But one aide to the House Republican leadership, which sided with House Democrats against the proposed Social Security freeze, expressed little sympathy. “We told them often enough,” he said. “They apparently were under the assumption we’d just be good little sheep and go along.”

Friction grew as both House and Senate negotiators began to sort out the prospects for obtaining significant deficit reduction under the budget approach endorsed Wednesday by Reagan--a plan that abandons both the House clampdown on long-range defense spending commitments and the Senate proposal to hold down federal pension costs by denying next year’s cost-of-living increases.

Although they vowed to work together, leaders of each side insisted that it is up to the other to find and propose spending cuts that could fill the gap left by the decision to allow spending to grow in those two areas.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) called upon House negotiators to come up with at least $28 billion in spending cuts over three years--enough to replace the amount the Senate had hoped to save by denying next year’s increases in Social Security and other pensions.

Without such savings, he said, there is “very little chance of getting a budget that my conferees will support and I will support.”

House Budget Committee Chairman William H. Gray III (D-Pa.), meeting with Democratic members of his committee, told them to scour their budget proposal for additional savings.

New Cuts Expected

He said he expects to find at least $1.5 billion in 1986 spending cuts, and possibly as much as $6 billion. This start could put them well on their way to the $28-billion three-year target that Domenici set.

But Gray also made it clear that he does not consider the burden for proposing additional spending cuts to be on the House, which managed to claim equivalent savings to the Senate plan without curbing Social Security benefits.

Domenici, Gray quipped, “says: ‘We’ve got to cut $28 billion.’ I say: ‘Who is we, kemo sabe?’ ” However, Senate leaders have contended that the House plan is inflated with artificial savings.

Although it was Senate Republicans who found themselves isolated uncomfortably on the Social Security issue, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said anger at the new approach to the budget is widespread: “A lot of Democratic senators and Republican senators are pretty upset by what they perceive to be a House-White House combine.”

Both Parties Angry

Indeed, criticism of the White House came from both parties in the Senate. Sen. Lawton Chiles of Florida, the Senate Budget Committee’s ranking Democrat, said Reagan did not bargain for additional spending cuts from House members before he agreed to abandon the Social Security proposal.

“The President didn’t ask anything before he took anything off the (bargaining) table,” Chiles said.

But others pointed out that Reagan, who promised in last year’s campaign not to tamper with Social Security benefits, had never liked the Senate proposal. He had agreed to it reluctantly only after Senate Republicans insisted upon it.

Likely to be hardest hit by the President’s about-face on Social Security are the 21 Republican senators--among them Rudman and Grassley--who will be on next year’s ballot. Their political fates will determine whether Republicans hold their tenuous 53-47 Senate majority, and they now face the prospect of Democratic attacks on their support for the Senate’s unsuccessful Social Security proposal.

‘Stupid Politics’

Democrats have proved skillful at using Social Security issues against GOP candidates in the past, and they clearly expect to capitalize on it again. As one Democratic campaign strategist put it: “They did the worst possible thing. They went ahead and (proposed cutting) Social Security, and now they are backing away from it. That’s just stupid politics.”

Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, said Republicans must “dig in and get ready for the (campaign) ads that are coming, and we’ve seen them all.”

But he said he hopes Republicans can convince voters that their Social Security proposal was a bold and necessary step toward reducing a deficit that is expected to balloon to almost $230 billion next year.