WASHINGTON INSIGHT

STRUGGLE OVER CRIME: Democratic sponsors of a moribund anti-crime bill would like to see it revived and passed, but they say they will be content to let it stay buried if President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress continue to insist on major changes.

The omnibus measure was narrowly approved in the House, then killed in the Senate by a GOP filibuster and Bush’s threat to veto it as Congress adjourned last month. Opponents demanded that the bill, which expands the federal death penalty and sets a federal waiting period on handgun purchases, do more to limit Death Row appeals and to loosen curbs on the use of illegally seized evidence.

“The ball is in the Republicans’ court,” one prominent Democrat said. “We’ve got the toughest crime bill in history and America needs it, but even if we play to a draw and don’t get a bill, we (Democrats) are in pretty good position. We’ve protected ourselves from attack in 30-second ads” in next year’s election campaigns.

One key Republican in the fight disagreed, however. He said: “That bill is soft on crime and (Democrats) will have to compromise. Otherwise, we’ll have a good issue next year.”

SEEKING THE ‘DOABLE’: House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), who regards himself as one of President Bush’s best friends among Democrats, appears determined to soft-pedal partisan name-calling in working out a compromise tax-reduction bill for early next year.

“The country is tired of bickering here in Washington,” he tells anyone who will listen.

Rostenkowski is trying to reduce confrontation with the White House by working out before Bush’s State of the Union address next month a package of proposals that would get support from a bipartisan majority on his 36-member panel.

He bluntly told Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady and Budget Director Richard G. Darman recently: “We’ve got to sit down and figure out what is doable.”

FADING ENERGY?: Word has spread that the Energy Department’s office of energy research is facing a 10% to 15% reduction in its budget for the next fiscal year, and this is causing a struggle of epic proportions among the nation’s leading physics laboratories.

Word has it that one potential casualty is the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

With the $8.25-billion superconducting super collider shielded from cuts by its heady status as a “presidential initiative,” the rollback also would likely force deep cuts in programs at Fermilab in Illinois and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and perhaps result in hundreds of layoffs as well as delays and cancellations of research programs.

At a fall meeting of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, many leading physicists, including Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman (a former Fermilab director), singled out the Stanford accelerator project as a prime candidate for the hit.

The reason for the 10% to 15% cut, energy insiders say, is to allow the department to free up more money, not only for the super collider but also for such programs as the search for new materials, the human gene mapping initiative and the development of high-performance computers.

Of course, with the fiscal 1993 budget submissions to Congress still many weeks off, nothing is final.

Burton Richter, director of the Stanford lab, said: “I am not going to go softly into the night.”