NEWS ANALYSIS : 101st Congress: Mixed Record of Achievement

The 101st Congress, finally giving up the ghost uncommonly close to Halloween and Election Day, staggered across the finish line early this morning with a mixed record of achievement.

Before ending its two-year term, the group of 100 senators and 435 House members produced the biggest deficit-reduction plan in history and passed major clean air, minimum wage, child care, housing and immigration legislation that had been put off for more than a decade.

But for some there were disappointments, notably the failure to override President Bush’s veto of a civil rights bill, to revise campaign finance laws or to put the death penalty and an assault weapons ban in a crime bill.

Paradoxically, the impressive achievements were overshadowed somewhat by growing public disgust over Congress’ disorderly ways and ethical lapses. While the political parties endlessly brawled over taxes and spending, extraordinary scandals brought down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright and now envelop Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and four other senators who helped a major campaign contributor battle savings and loan regulators.

“There have been some very substantial accomplishments,” Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) said, “but the thing the American people are mainly upset about is that it hasn’t been very pretty.”

Part of the problem is divided government--a Democratic-controlled Congress pitted against a Republican President--but other factors include billowing fiscal problems and increasingly daunting congressional procedures.

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), while proclaiming “significant accomplishments” by the 101st Congress, nevertheless has ordered a study of hoary Senate rules that are meant to both protect individual senators’ rights and slow legislative stampedes--but also have mired operations. He said the review of Senate procedures will cover everything from a senator’s right to unlimited debate and unlimited amendments to a senator’s ability to place an indefinite “hold” on legislation that he or she does not like.

Under special scrutiny will be the budget process, which veered out of congressional channels into “summit” talks with White House officials at an Air Force base officers’ club, finally producing a weeks-long debacle that saw a deficit-reduction agreement crash in partisan acrimony and the government briefly shut down.

“The budget process has so come to dominate the legislative process, it’s like a whale in a bathtub. It doesn’t leave room for anything else,” Mitchell lamented.

Democrats are expected to retain their Senate and House majorities in the 102nd Congress that will be elected a week from Tuesday and take office Jan. 3. Democratic leaders are serving notice they will press two issues in the next session: still-higher taxes on the rich and a broad health-care package that fills insurance gaps and helps pay nursing home expenses.

“The significance of this session is that we as a (Democratic) party have been successful at the end in fighting back for middle Americans and working families,” said Rep. David E. Bonior (D-Mich.), chief deputy whip of the House Democrats. “In the next Congress, comprehensive health care is going to be a major issue, along with fairness in the tax area.”

Another top item on the agenda will be proposals to reduce the influence of special-interest money on congressional decisions. The proposals include revising campaign finance laws and banning senators’ outside-speaking fees or honorariums.

The Senate and House passed differing measures this year that called for restrictions on donations by political action committees (PACs) and for campaign subsidies for candidates who accept spending limits.

But the legislation, which also would have extended an existing ban on House members’ honorariums to senators, collapsed when Bush vowed to veto any bill with campaign spending caps.

For House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), the session left “an extraordinary record,” made all the more so by lawmakers’ determination to tackle the $490-billion package of deficit-reducing pain just before facing voters.

“The simple thing to do would be to put off these issues and pass them on to a future time,” Foley contended. “The fact that the Congress has taken these actions right before an election is to its great credit, to its relevancy. . . . It is not as tidy as everybody would wish, but it is serious and politically difficult.”

Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.) agreed.

“We could have accepted the budget summit agreement a month ago and gone home to campaign,” he said. “But then people would have said: ‘You did what? Less Medicare, a home heating fuel tax, a 12-cent gasoline tax, cuts that hit low-income people?’

“We stayed and voted it down,” creating chaos, “but this is democracy in action,” Cohen continued. “We have vying interests trying to strike agreement on the equities.”

When Congress called it quits at 1:17 a.m. EST today, only 10 days before Election Day, it was the latest adjournment in an election year since World War II.

At 3 a.m. Saturday, as a bleary House was grinding toward a final budget vote, Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) told colleagues there were three reasons to support the bill: “Because we can go home, because we can go home, because we can go home.”

Staff writer Michael Ross contributed to this story.