75 Senators Visit Reagan, Vow Swift Action on Tax Bill

WASHINGTON — Momentum for tax revision picked up Thursday, as 75 senators met with President Reagan at the White House to extol the bill’s virtues and to pledge swift action toward its passage in an unusually congenial spirit of bipartisanship.

The idea of overhauling income tax law is so popular that “I would be very much surprised if it isn’t passed by the Senate by a vote of 100 to 0,” Senate Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) told Reagan at the breakfast session.

Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) called tax reform the Senate’s “No. 1 priority” and said that work on the bill will be completed by the end of next week. Only a few months before, Dole had predicted that the Senate would not act on the tax legislation until the contentious debate over the 1987 budget is resolved.

“We’re going to be done with this tax bill before we ever finish with the budget process,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), the man given the most credit for ramming the bill through a crucial vote of that panel last month.

Lobbyists Lying Low

Packwood told reporters that lobbyists for special interests are notably absent as the full Senate considers the tax package. “They are going to save whatever ammunition they have for conference, and they are not even going to make an attempt in the Senate to undo the bill,” he said.

After the Senate passes new tax rules, the differences between its bill and the version passed earlier by the House must be resolved in a conference committee.

Packwood said that, as of Wednesday evening, no senator had filed any amendment to the bill--an unusual occurrence with tax legislation. In fact, Sen. Russell B. Long (D-La.) recalled that, in his 33 years on the Finance Committee, he has had so many amendments “heaped on” him that he would “almost shuck ‘em like you’d shuck corn, to get down to the ones that were really good and deserved to be a part of the bill.”

Nevertheless, the senators agreed that there is strong support for an amendment to preserve the tax deductibility of contributions to individual retirement accounts, which would be ended for most IRAs under the Senate bill. But Packwood pointed out that other, equally unpopular steps would then have to be taken to ensure that the bill would not cut federal revenue.

Show-Biz Advice

Even though the White House breakfast meeting took place only hours before a crucial Senate vote on a controversial package of arms for Saudi Arabia, the President established a light tone before taking questions from the senators. After noting that television cameras this week had been allowed in the Senate chamber for the first time, Reagan offered a little friendly advice on how to succeed on TV:

“You learn your lines; don’t bump into the furniture,” he said. “And, in the kissing scenes, keep your mouth closed.”

And he had a memento for Long, to commemorate his long career. Calling him “a senator’s senator” and observing that his four decades on Capitol Hill represented “a fifth of the entire life of our nation,” Reagan presented Long with a green T-shirt bearing the long-prevailing wisdom on tax reform:

“Don’t tax you; don’t tax me; tax that fella behind the tree.”

‘Best in History’

An obviously appreciative Long told Reagan: “This is the best revenue bill that’s ever been reported out of any committee, to my knowledge, in the history of the country.”

He later told reporters that “tax planning won’t work anymore” and that the Senate measure would produce “a change for the better in the way we do business here in the United States. It’s tax reform by proper definition.”

Reagan had invited all 100 senators to the meeting, and all but 25 accepted. Those who were there seemed to set aside political differences to celebrate what Reagan called “a political triumph” in the pending tax legislation.

“You’re the first Republican President that I can recall who actively supported tax reform,” Byrd told Reagan, and he predicted swift and unanimous Senate passage of the bill.