Highway Veto Upheld but Democrats Get 2d Chance : Key Senator Reconsiders His Stand

The Senate voted today to sustain President Reagan’s veto of the $88-billion highway bill, but a Democratic freshman who had already switched his vote once gave Democrats a new chance to make the bill law.

Sen. Terry Sanford (D-N.C.), who was the only Democrat to side with the President, said he will vote to take the measure up again.

The move gave the Democrats a chance to reverse an earlier 65-35 vote and override Reagan’s veto of the measure, which has wide bipartisan support because of the huge amount of money it pumps into most states.

Sanford decided to agree to a new vote within hours of the first vote and after Senate Democratic leader Robert C. Byrd, a major backer of the highway bill, pursued a parliamentary maneuver to have a new vote. Byrd said he needed only one vote to defeat Reagan’s veto in a second vote.

‘Relying on My Word’

“I voted the way that I said that I would vote, and a number of people were relying on my word,” Sanford said of his first vote against an override. “I felt that I was compelled to do that.”

In explaining that he is now in favor of reconsidering the vote, Sanford, 69, said, “I have thought a little bit more deeply about the implications” of his earlier vote.

“It’s worth looking at one more time,” Sanford said.

Sanford’s remarks triggered a slowdown by Republicans, suddenly scrambling to find an offsetting vote. “I’m not convinced we can’t find another vote on the Republican side,” said Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, who said he wants to delay a final showdown until Reagan can return to Washington from a speaking trip to Philadelphia.

In the meantime, Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole, using an office just off the Senate floor, was seeking converts to Reagan’s cause.

Test of Reagan Prestige

The maneuvering only served to heighten the stakes in the politically charged showdown that the GOP has sought to turn into a test of Reagan’s prestige after months of buffeting by the Iran- contra scandal.

Sanford, the only Senate Democrat to vote against the bill last month when it was approved 79 to 17, earlier in the day broke away from a circle of as many as 15 colleagues to vote “present.” That vote would have led to a successful 66-33 override.

But moments later, as Democrats watched in amazement, Sanford changed his vote to “no,” giving Reagan at least a tentative victory.

It takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to override a veto. The House easily overrode the President on Tuesday, 350 to 73, but Reagan and top Administration officials have lobbied strenuously in recent days in hopes of sustaining his position in the Senate.

‘Won Fair and Square’

After the initial vote, Byrd asked for five hours of debate before the second ballot but was immediately met with objections from Republicans anxious to nail down their victory.

“In my view it’s over,” said Dole said. “We won fair and square.”

The vote, at least temporarily, keeps states from increasing speed limits on rural interstate highways to 65 m.p.h.

“The American people are being shafted by this vote,” Byrd said. “It’s jobs, that’s what it is. . . . It’s the American people who will lose. We don’t have a highway bill. . . . And meanwhile the construction season is slipping away.”

Byrd said that the President “isn’t going to rise or fall on this vote” and that 800,000 construction jobs would be lost if the veto stuck. “The job you lose may be your own,” he warned lawmakers. But he also conceded that if the veto was sustained it would be because of politics “because the White House has put it on that basis.”