Key Leaders Won’t Back Tax Reform : GOP Reps. Lott and Cheney Say Reagan Won’t Sway Them

With President Reagan heading to Capitol Hill today in an unusual, humbling effort to keep his own Republican Party allies from killing tax reform legislation, key GOP leaders in the House served notice Sunday that he cannot charm them into supporting the bill.

In a signal that Reagan will have his work cut out for him, House Republican Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi and Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, both said in television interviews that they would not vote to dismantle procedural roadblocks to consideration of the legislation.

Furthermore, Cheney, White House chief of staff during the Gerald R. Ford Administration, said that Reagan has only himself to blame if the tax overhaul plan--the cornerstone of Reagan’s second-term domestic program--falls victim to a revolt of House Republicans.

GOP Warnings Cited

The White House failed to change its legislative strategy on tax revision, even though Republican leaders told Reagan several times of their displeasure over the way the bill was shaping up in the Democratic-run House Ways and Means Committee, Cheney complained in an interview on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

“Repeated warnings had been given to the President himself, directly, that there was trouble on taxes, that the tax bill was headed in a direction we thought in the end the majority of House Republicans would oppose,” Cheney said. “But nothing ever happened.”

Republicans had openly complained that the Ways and Means package not only distorted Reagan’s original goal of streamlining the tax system but would hamstring economic growth. Lott, the No. 2 Republican in the House, acknowledged that White House indifference to those concerns was at least partly responsible for a widespread party revolt last week against a Reagan plea to keep the concept alive by supporting the bill.

‘Real Factor Is the Bill’

“That’s just one small factor,” he said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “It’s a fact that there’s a great deal of frustration that’s been felt on the Republican side of the aisle in the House, but the real factor is the bill itself.”

In a complex and surprising turn of events, all but 14 of the 172 Republicans in the House voted last week to defy Reagan and reject further consideration of the tax overhaul scheme. Although Reagan had objected to several elements in the Ways and Means draft, he urged Republicans to vote for the Democratic plan so that the Republican-run Senate could get a chance to rewrite it next year.

Under the Constitution, revenue matters--among them tax reform--must originate in the House.

Neither Cheney nor Lott would predict whether Reagan could shake enough Republican votes loose to bring the bill to the House floor. “It could be possible, but it’s going to be very difficult,” Lott said.

After last week’s debacle, Democratic leaders said that Reagan would have to guarantee enough GOP support to bring the bill to the floor and get it passed before they would agree to any more tax reform votes. Both procedural and final House votes would be set this week if Reagan’s lobbying proved successful. If Reagan should fail, the bill would remain technically alive but would be frozen in parliamentary limbo.

Adding to Reagan’s problems are reports that Democratic support is also slipping. Key Democrats from energy-rich states are known to be cool to the measure because of its impact on tax breaks for oil producers. Cheney said one House Democrat told him Saturday that “at least 20” Democrats who voted for the bill last week have switched sides.

Rostenkowski’s Denial

Speaking on the same program as Cheney, Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, denied any significant erosion of Democratic support. But Rostenkowski said that Reagan would have to persuade at least 50 reluctant Republicans--and maybe 60--to change their minds or tax revision will die.

“This bill has had the last rites so many times it’s almost unbelievable,” Rostenkowski said. “If the President uses the full force of the presidency (and) will meet with the Republicans, I think that there’ll be more than 50 (Republican) votes for this legislation.”

Despite the pleas of the President, Cheney said, he could not bring himself to vote for a bill that was in a form that Reagan himself would probably veto if it reached his desk.

“This bill is tax reform in name only,” Cheney contended. “It’s 1,400 pages long. It’s your typical special-interest grab bag of goodies for all the various interests that have some interest in tax legislation.”