Lawmakers Play a Risky End-Game in Their Chaotic Rush to Adjourn : Congress: The rules include horse trading and tantrums. The goal is to slip pet bills through.

Lobbyist Tom Korologos was spending a gorgeous Sunday afternoon scurrying around the gloomy halls of the Capitol, “running traps” with committee aides and sympathetic lawmakers on behalf of his clients.

He wanted to make sure that Congress, in its scramble to wrap up the year’s business by Thanksgiving, was not going to slip through an assault-weapons ban fought by the National Rifle Assn. or an excise tax on beer opposed by Anheuser-Busch.

“So far,” he said cheerily, “nothing’s happened, which is fine with me!”

At the end of a session--with Congress meeting on weekends and almost around the clock--Capitol Hill always seems to go a bit crazy. Long-mired legislation suddenly spurts forward, horse trading is constant and the atmosphere is supercharged.

“There is a sharp conflict between the need to get things done and the almost overwhelming desire to get the hell out of town,” congressional scholar Norman Ornstein said Monday. “The whole institution is built on inertia designed by the framers of the Constitution. But, when Congress reaches cruising speed at the end, there is a question of how much baggage you can get on the few cars headed for a destination.”

Clever politicians know that, in the legislative arena, the most powerful and sophisticated play is the end-game. In the chaotic rush to adjourn, there is opportunity created by the tremendous drive to make things happen. But the game is complex and risky because the legislative players have to figure out how to extract as much as possible without having the whole enterprise come crashing down.

Thus, while Korologos was trying to “prevent anything evil” happening to his clients, Senate and House leaders were laboring furiously to negotiate compromise agreements on two emotional, complicated issues: deficit reduction and catastrophic health care.

“There are people who know that a certain amount of stubbornness and being cantankerous ultimately pays off at the end,” said Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey), chairman of the House Budget Committee and a leading bargainer on a bill to cut the federal deficit by $14 billion.

About 2 a.m. last Saturday, after weary lawmakers negotiating on the measure had haggled over billions of dollars in spending cuts and new revenues, Rep. Sam Gibbons (D-Fla.) suddenly asked: “What about my little old cigar amendment?” It was a measure to permit cigar concerns in his Tampa district to put personalized labels on imported cigars.

When told that the amendment had been tossed out at an earlier session, he “screamed and pounded on the table--threw an unbelievable tantrum,” a Senate source said. And his little cigar amendment got stuck back in.

Meanwhile, Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) was upset that legislation he had shepherded through a long committee process had been removed from the deficit-reduction measure. It was a sweeping plan to revise the way doctors are paid under Medicare, and Rockefeller was determined to see it restored.

Saturday, he summoned key players in Congress and the Administration to a Capitol Hill powwow and got the ball rolling. Then, a powerful House baron, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), jumped into the end-game fray, along with Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Energy and Commerce health and environment subcommittee.

Now, the measure had real momentum. And legislation that had seemingly been buried only days before suddenly had been resurrected and restored to the deficit-reduction bill.

On another front, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and others were trying to ensure that a bill of theirs slid through in the closing hours.

It was a measure to beef up recently enacted disaster assistance to victims of both Hurricane Hugo and the San Francisco Bay Area earthquake, including $40 million to repair quake-damaged airports and the extension of quake relief aid to California farmers.

Mitchell, Cranston and company pleaded with senators not to try to load controversial pet projects onto the bill, arguing that too much legislative cargo might sink the disaster aid measure.

After Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.) was talked out of trying to add an amendment requiring that disaster aid to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico be shipped on American vessels, the relief measure appeared headed for passage.

“At this point, anybody can hold up a bill by filibustering it or offering controversial amendments,” said Cranston aide Roy Greenaway. “You try to get around it by saying: ‘This is important to me for my state, and I wish you’d hold o”

Trading of favors is rampant in these situations but usually is not trumpeted in press releases.

“Some senators keep track with notebooks,” Greenaway said. “We don’t. We simply try to be as helpful as we can be when things come along for the other senator.”

The time pressure gives lawmakers tremendous leverage at session’s end.

In many previous years, Sen. Howard H. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) has blocked passage of what he called narrow special-interest bills simply by threatening to filibuster them. Lawmakers eager to start their recess sometimes will cave in rather than delay their post-session plans.

In a similar vein, an unidentified Republican senator put a “hold” last weekend on the nomination of San Francisco attorney Vaughn Walker to a federal judgeship, blocking a floor vote. Reportedly, the senator had nothing against Walker but was simply trying to pressure Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) into helping him push a pet bill through the Senate. Ironically, the move was an unsolicited boon to Cranston.

Cranston had strenuously opposed President Bush’s nomination of Walker on grounds that he had belonged to a club that excluded women. However, Cranston had given up hope of blocking the appointment before the unexpected help came as if out of nowhere.

Negotiations on the main obstacles to adjournment--the deficit-cutting bill and a revision of catastrophic health care--sometimes were plodding. Even though Democratic leaders called Congress into a rare Sunday session, most lawmakers spent the afternoon watching pro football on television.

In fact, Senate and House conferees on the catastrophic care bill gathered in a room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building and immediately flicked on the Philadelphia-Minnesota game. They emerged a couple of hours later, having accomplished nothing.

That prompted Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to erupt in fury.

“Where is the Senate? Where is the action?” he protested to a nearly empty Senate chamber at 1:20 p.m.

“There seems to be no sanity in the way we meet around here.”

But to lobbyist Korologos, an old Washington hand, the situation was not surprising. Up to a certain point, there is frenzied action, then the waiting game begins.

“These sessions tend to peter out instead of go out with a mass howl of glory,” he said. “Neither house dares leave town because they feel the other one might try something. So we wait.”

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), frustrated by wrangling over the budget, agreed. “Everybody plays Russian roulette around here in the final days. Everybody wants the other guy to give in,” he said.

Is this kind of chaotic legislating good for public policy?

Panetta, having just reached an arduous agreement on the deficit bill, let out a loud laugh at the question.

“I don’t want any little kids to hear how we made this sausage,” he said.

But Ornstein was more sanguine. “I think it is not terribly hurtful for the Republic because, in the long run, most of the mischief done can be ironed out,” he said. “If we never had an end of session, we would never have an impetus to conclude things that need to be concluded.”