Santa Ana : GOP Congressmen Say They Will Fight for Cuts

Four of the five congressmen with Orange County constituents said this week that they doubted Congress had the stomach to make deep cuts in the budget this year as the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction measure requires.

But Reps. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach), William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach) and Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad) promised members of the Republican Associates of Orange County, who met with the lawmakers Thursday in Santa Ana, that they would fight for major cuts in the nation’s $203-billion deficit and would try to block any Democratic spending plans.

At issue was “what we pledge to the American people,” Lungren said. To cut the budget would mean not only cutting fraud or waste in federal spending; it would mean cutting some worthwhile programs, too. “Some are more worthy than the others,” he said.

The problem of paring the nation’s deficit is analogous to the difficulty a parent faces when his child demands five educational toys for Christmas, Lungren said. “You don’t think you’re Scrooge by saying you can only afford three.”

The Gramm-Rudman Act seeks a balanced budget by 1991 and sets a timetable for reductions. The act requires an $11.7-billion cut in federal spending by March 1 this year, additional cuts that would reduce the deficit to $144 billion by next year and cuts of even greater amounts until 1991. Although a federal judicial panel declared a key section of the act unconstitutional last week, the act is still in effect pending a ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court.

Republican Associates of Orange County, made up of dues-paying Republican businessmen, political consultants and other party activists, was holding its annual luncheon for the Orange County congressional delegation. The county’s fifth representative, Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), was in Vietnam this week, traveling with a congressional delegation investigating the fate of those missing in action in the Vietnam War.