Bush Gains in Battle to Sustain Cable Rate Veto : Legislation: But President, in uphill struggle, needs 4 more votes to avert embarrassing defeat in Senate today.

President Bush gained vital support from wavering Republican senators Sunday but still faces an uphill struggle to win the votes that would sustain his veto of a cable television bill strongly backed by Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton.

With the Senate casting the first of two showdown votes in Congress today, Senate Republican Whip Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming said the President needs to pick up four more votes to keep his veto record perfect--and to avert an embarrassing defeat in the final month of the election campaign.

As lawmakers pushed toward adjournment for the year, the House in a rare Sunday session also approved a $2.3-billion spending bill to finance the legislative branch through next Sept. 30 and debated legislation that would rewrite the 120-year-old law governing mining on federal lands.

But hopes for adjourning by early Tuesday were dealt an 11th-hour setback by an escalating parliamentary fight over one of this year’s most ambitious pieces of legislation--a wide ranging energy bill designed to lessen the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) warned that Monday would be a long day. “Members should bring their sleeping bags,” he said.

The bill to regulate the price of basic cable service has been overshadowed by “pure raw partisan politics,” Simpson told reporters after a White House breakfast at which Bush lobbied a group of GOP senators.

“We have a tough vote,” Simpson said, expressing hope that “as they roll the bombs down here for (the President), there are still enough of us to throw our bodies over the live grenades to keep ‘em from blowing up.”

Sources said that an intense Administration lobbying effort has persuaded five Republican senators who originally backed the bill to switch sides and support the President. The White House believes that it now has 30 votes, four short of the number needed to sustain a veto if all 100 senators vote.

The Senate will vote first today because the cable bill originated there. The President needs one-third of the votes cast in only one chamber, either the House or the Senate, and White House lobbyists are convinced they have a better chance to prevail in the Senate.

Supporters of the cable legislation must get two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate to enact the bill into law over Bush’s veto.

The President has vetoed 35 bills without a successful override.

In addition to Simpson, the other Republican senators who have promised to switch their votes and back the President are Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, sources said.

The pool of Republicans in which the White House is still fishing for votes includes John W. Warner of Virginia, Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, Dave Durenberger of Minnesota, James M. Jeffords of Vermont and Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

The President needs to hook four of the five, but as Simpson, a skilled trout fisherman, admitted, “It’s very difficult to catch four in a pool.”

Warner has been feeling pressure to sustain the veto from a powerful constituent, the Rev. Pat Robertson, the businessman and conservative religious leader. Robertson has extensive financial interests in cable programming and the bill, by regulating cable rates, could reduce the revenues that cable operators have available to buy his Family Channel programs.

Simpson predicted that the rising intensity of Democratic attacks will force Republicans to stand with their President.

Indeed, the Clinton camp has used some of its strongest rhetoric to attack the cable veto. Bush “has slapped American consumers across the face, sentencing them to continue paying outrageous cable television bills,” George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, said after the veto was announced on Saturday.

Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), a key sponsor of the bill, said that “Bush has vetoed the most important consumer legislation of the year--all to protect his rich friends in the cable monopolies.”

The bill, prompted by consumer complaints about the rising cost of cable rates, passed by large majorities, 280 to 128 in the House and 74 to 25 in the Senate. The television broadcasting industry also is lobbying hard for passage because the bill would permit stations to get payments from cable operators for carrying their programs.

The President says the bill would add excessive regulation and actually raise cable costs rather than reduce them.

The bill gives the federal government the power to set “reasonable” rates for basic cable service: the network broadcasts of ABC, NBC, CBS and the Fox network, local independent television stations, public television outlets and the stations operated by local governments and school boards.

The House had been expected to take up the 1,300-page energy bill late Sunday night. But Nevada’s tiny two-member House delegation, angered over a provision that could make it easier for the Energy Department to locate a high-level nuclear waste disposal site in their state, sought to pressure negotiators into dropping the provision by forcing a number of time-consuming procedural votes on the House floor.

While the bill is still expected to pass in the House before adjournment, Nevada’s senators were threatening more procedural delays that could doom the two-year-long effort to enact a new national energy strategy this year.

Lawmakers anxious to dispose of the peoples’ business so they can go home to campaign for reelection also were waiting for word from the White House on whether Bush would accept a compromise tax bill crafted by House and Senate negotiators Saturday night.

The House was poised to approve the $27-billion tax agreement, which contains about $10 billion in inner-city aid, today. But while the negotiators dropped two tax-increase provisions that Bush had vowed to veto, the President’s support remained in doubt as the White House examined the bill’s other revenue raising measures.

The tax bill “is an open question at this point,” House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) conceded.

Mindful of voter anger over congressional perks, Congress trimmed $29 million in passing the $2.3-billion bill to finance its operations and those of related agencies. The measure includes $1.5 billion for the House and Senate and $732 million for the Library of Congress, the General Accounting Office and other agencies.

A Senate-passed amendment sponsored by Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) to slash congressional spending by 15% over three years was quietly removed by House and Senate conferees, who said they did not want to impose arbitrary budget cuts on future Congresses.

Times staff writer William J. Eaton contributed to this story.