White House Vows to Try Again to Win Passage of Contra Aid

The White House, on the heels of back-to-back House defeats of measures calling for aid to Nicaragua’s Contras, pledged Monday to try yet again to win congressional support.

“Isn’t it time,” President Reagan asked in a speech, “for Congress to have the courage to show where it stands?”

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater declined to speculate on whether the new proposal for Contra aid would have a military component. But he predicted that, in this presidential election year, the House’s double defeat of Contra aid “will be an issue in the spring campaign, the summer campaign and the fall campaign.”

Meanwhile, House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) said that the House is growing weary of the Contra issue and that he will begin calling for votes on other legislation.

Reagan, addressing a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said: “Courage hasn’t exactly been the watchword of some opponents of Contra aid. Last week, aid opponents tried to pass the buck of responsibility for abandoning in the field the young men and women of the democratic resistance.

“Now it’s time for Congress to show that it knows you can’t have real peace negotiations when one side has helicopter gunships and the other has bandages.”

Last Thursday, the House turned down, 216 to 208, a package proposed by Wright that would have provided $30 million in non-military aid to the Contras. It had voted 219 to 211 on Feb. 3 to kill Reagan’s $36.25-million aid package, which included $3.6 million in military aid.

As a result of the two setbacks, according to the White House, the pipeline of U.S. aid for the rebels, which the government says was shut down at the end of February, has dried up, and no U.S. assistance is reaching the Contras.

Fitzwater said that Reagan has spoken with House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) about a new package of aid for the Contras. He said the Administration also expects Wright to try to come up with another plan.

But Wright said Monday that “there is a weariness with the Contra issue.”

Complaining that the cutoff of all U.S. aid to the rebels removed the United States from a position of influence in the Central American peace effort, Wright said, “It just throws it into the hands of the Central Americans entirely.”

Wright, referring to efforts in the Senate to produce an aid package, indicated that there might be procedural obstacles because legislation appropriating money traditionally originates in the House.