Squirming Off the Hook

President Reagan is right on a budget issue for once, but for curious reasons. The White House has abandoned its earlier position and now wants a simple raising of the long-term federal debt limit to $2.6 trillion, unencumbered by any other legislation such as budget reform. This is the course that Congress should follow.

The irony of the situation is that the White House has taken its new position in order to squirm off the hook of a more restrictive Gramm-Rudman budget deficit reduction law.

The periodic expiration of each new level of the debt limit, as occurred recently, provides a handy crisis point for Congress. The limit must be raised or government would grind to a halt--a situation that was narrowly averted Thursday with the approval of an emergency one-week extensionof the old debt limit. The temptation is to graft some other legislative provision onto the the debt-limit bill, knowing that it must be passed into law. Earlier this year the White House saw the July deadline as a good lever for winning some of the budget changes that the President has sought, although Congress will not approve either of the two major provisions that the President wants most: a balanced-budget constitutional amendment or a line-item veto.

Some Senate Democrats and Republicans were not about to let this opportunity pass, however, without an attempt to put some teeth back into the Gramm-Rudman law. The Republicans include Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, authors of the 1985 provision that mandates annual $36-billion cuts in the federal deficit. Gramm-Rudman remains on the books, but its primary enforcement mechanism--automatic cuts if Congress fails to reach the deficit target--has been struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

Many senators want to restore a provision for automatic reductions. Two attempts to do so failed late last week, but a compromise version that included some budget reform is being debated now. Democrats see the threat of Gramm-Rudman with new teeth as a way of forcing the President into accepting a proposed $19-billion tax increase on the theory that taxes would be more palatable to him than a big, automatic reduction in the defense budget. Reagan vows to veto any tax increase.

Once an enthusiastic supporter of the Gramm-Rudman law--in public at least--the President now is backing away from it. The reason is clear. The mandatory reductions under a revised Gramm-Rudman law would hit defense as hard as it would hit domestic programs. The President is all for cutting the domestic budget, but is not willing to have the Defense Department share in the sacrifice.

This debate again illustrates the folly of trying to budget by automatic pilot and legislate by blackjack. Congress should let Gramm-Rudman fade into the background. If the President wants more defense spending, he should pay for it with new taxes. And the debt ceiling should be allowed to rise as necessary before the government precipitates another phony fiscal crisis.