Congress Reconvening as Election-Year Battles Loom : Legislation: Health care, taxes and education are among the key issues facing the lawmakers. President Bush has set a clearly partisan tone.

When lawmakers convened in Washington at this time last year for the start of the 102nd Congress, the prospect of a war with Iraq overshadowed all other concerns.

When they return to Capitol Hill today, Democrats and Republicans will again be set to do battle--only this time the line will be drawn not in the sand but down the middle of such election-year issues as jobs, taxes, education and health care.

And the battles are expected to be particularly acrimonious.

President Bush set the unmistakably partisan tone that will shape--if not distort--nearly everything Congress does this year. “If they want a fight, they’re going to have one,” he said while campaigning in New Hampshire last week, declaring that he is sick of being used as “a punching bag” by “carping little liberal Democrats.”

Swinging back the next day, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine suggested that Bush hopes to fight the Persian Gulf War “many times between now and the elections. But what people are worried about now is the economy.”

While Bush will try to steal some of the Democrats’ thunder on the economy by unveiling new proposals in his State of the Union address next Tuesday, Democrats are likely to characterize his efforts as inadequate and too obviously motivated by election-year concern for votes.

But as the Senate reconvenes today, and the House follows suit Wednesday, the Democrats are still struggling to develop a consensus on the kind of tax cut and economic-growth package that they would support as an alternative to Bush’s proposals.

While most are leaning toward a middle-income tax cut, the Democrats differ on whether to focus the benefits mainly on families with children or to reduce taxes for everyone based on their Social Security payroll taxes. Some want to finance the tax cuts by raising taxes on those in the top brackets, while others want to reduce Pentagon spending to pay for them.

A key member of the House leadership said that sharp policy differences between Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.), his Senate counterpart as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, would make it hard to agree on a single Democratic counterproposal on taxes.

But another Democratic aide suggested that the tone and text of Bush’s much-awaited State of the Union message could change that. “If he has an in-your-face attitude (toward the Democrats), we could have a unified Democratic Senate and House package,” he said.

Other issues expected to inspire election-year fights include the costs of health care and the quality of education. Democrats, courting election-year votes no less avidly than Republicans, plan to start immediate work on both issues.

The first order of business when the Senate reconvenes will be the Neighborhood Schools Improvement Act, a Democratic initiative that would create a new, multimillion-dollar, 10-year program of grants to states to fund education reform in public schools.

Republicans oppose it because only public schools would be eligible for the aid and because it would establish a national council on education that would compete with a similar panel already created by Bush.

A plethora of proposals for health care reform also will dominate the debate this year, with the first fight expected to be over a “pay-or-play” bill that would give employers the choice of either providing health care coverage for their workers or paying a payroll tax to finance a national health care service that would cover all those without private insurance.

In the House, Democrats are expected to push for another extension of unemployment benefits, as well as legislation to regulate the cable television industry.

In the Senate, a bipartisan coalition of pro-environment lawmakers will make another attempt to steer an omnibus energy policy bill to passage. The legislation will be similar to a measure that was successfully filibustered last year. But its two most controversial provisions--which would authorize drilling for oil in Alaska’s largest wildlife refuge and mandatory increases in fuel economy standards for cars--are likely to be dropped.

While both sides will be looking to the so-called “peace dividend” to pay for new programs with cuts in Pentagon spending, sharply partisan fights can be expected over where and how to cut more from the defense budget, with expensive but already scaled-back projects like the B-2 Stealth bomber and the Navy’s Seawolf submarine likely to come under the budget ax.

Never popular, foreign aid is likely to move from the back seat into the trunk this year as “America first” fever sweeps the land. However, an important exception could emerge from an evolving bipartisan consensus that the United States must do more to help the former Soviet Union dismantle nuclear weapons.

For all the attention that Congress will pay to voter concerns leading up to November, many of the proposals on which election-year positions are certain to be taken may not end up being approved. The energy bill, for instance, may make it through the Senate, but is likely to bog down in the House, where more than a dozen committees have jurisdiction over its complex provisions. And there are so many different proposals being formulated on health care that most lawmakers doubt the differences can be resolved in time for passage this year.

But the heated debates that these and other issues produce still will serve another, more nakedly political, end. For Democrats, the aim will be to put Bush on the political defensive by keeping the legislative agenda focused on the domestic issues that their party traditionally has championed.

“For Republicans,” one Senate GOP leadership aide said, “the challenge will lie in exposing all the Democratic differences on those issues to convince voters that, for all their campaign rhetoric, the Democrats have no clear alternatives” to the initiatives Bush is expected to outline in his State of the Union message.