Bush to Bring Up Line-Item Veto Process : Budget: Officials from the Administration say the fiscal summit with Democrats this week will examine procedures as well as dollars and cents.

Reiterating that no preconditions exist for this week’s budget negotiations with Congress, senior Bush Administration officials Sunday also said that the President intends to explore permanent changes in the budget process, including giving the President a line-item veto.

“It’s a budget summit, not a tax summit,” White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu declared of the talks that begin Tuesday.

“We hope they’ll talk about process, which has to be part of a final package,” Sununu added on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Separately, Richard G. Darman, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, predicted that the negotiations will come up with a deficit reduction “somewhere in the $45-billion to $55-billion range.”

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley,” Darman said: “I think I could write down what the agreement could be at the end of the process.” But the tricky part, he added, will be how to get the participants there “without getting themselves in such argument that things fall apart.”

The overriding goal of the budget talks is to find ways--through spending cuts and perhaps tax increases--to avoid the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts required by the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing law if the $64-billion deficit target is not met by Oct. 1.

“The President is going into these discussions with no preconditions,” Sununu said. That means, he added, “everything would be discussed, including process. . . . The President wants line-item veto.”

Forty-three governors have the authority to veto specific items in a state’s budget, and that power, if invested in the Oval Office, would confer upon a President “a stronger position” in budget negotiations, Darman added.

“It’s sensible and we ought to get some movement in that direction,” he added.

The question of who will first raise the issue of possible tax increases has preoccupied much of Washington for the last week.

“We’re not going to talk about raising taxes, I can tell you that much,” Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said on the Brinkley show.

Similarly, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), a Budget Committee member, said that the issue is not on the GOP agenda.

“What happens in all of these things,” Darman said, when asked to envision the deficit-reduction talks, “is initially no one wants to come forward with a new first proposal because the character of the new proposal is almost invariably that they’re a little bit unpopular--sometimes dramatically unpopular.

“So naturally enough politicians don’t want to put anything on the table. But eventually if people are there seriously and in good faith, things manage to get on the table. . . .”

Sununu did little to calm Democrats’ fears that the budget meetings will be a political trap to give Republicans ammunition to attack them.

“One of the things that I think ought to be clear is that the congressional failure--the failure of the leadership in Congress to be able to move the budget process forward--is an awfully good reason to elect Republicans,” Sununu said.

His remarks drew a sharp rebuke from Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), the House Budget Committee chairman.

“If again there’s going to be a game of political blamesmanship from one side to the other than frankly these talks are not going to get off to a very good start,” Panetta said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”