Dole Rejects Clinton's Offer to Cut Jobs Bill by $4 Billion

By JAMES RISEN and KAREN TUMULTY

April 17, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON —

President Clinton, in a major concession to Senate Republicans who have blocked passage of his $16.3-billion economic stimulus package, offered to eliminate $4 billion in “emergency” spending proposals that his opponents charge are laden with political pork.

Yet in a direct rebuke, the President’s compromise was quickly rejected by Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Thus, while the standoff continues, it appeared Friday that in his first major test of wills with the Republican opposition, Clinton had blinked first.

“I make this recommendation reluctantly and regret the unwillingness of the minority to let the Senate act on the original legislation,” Clinton wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. “But our mandate is to achieve change and to move our country forward and to end business as usual in Washington.”

In his response, Dole said: “Trimming a huge pork bill is no gift to the beleaguered taxpayers and neither is raising the deficit. No wonder even Democrats are running away from the package,” he said, referring to several Democratic senators whose support is now in doubt.

The dispute involves “a fundamental difference between Republicans and most Democrats, and it is a principle we won’t compromise,” he said.

Clinton said he is willing to accept a 25% reduction in the stimulus bill, trimming it to $12 billion but retaining key spending provisions. Those include programs to create summer jobs, an extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and funding for highway construction, childhood immunization, AIDS prevention, waste-water treatment, meat inspection and small business loans.

In an apparent effort to make the package more attractive to conservatives, Clinton also proposed to add $200 million for grants to local governments to hire police.

The President offered to impose 44% across-the-board cuts on the rest of the proposals, including such programs as community development block grants for big cities, Pell grants for student aid, funding for mass transit and for new money for upgrading Amtrak rail transportation.

The urban block grants have been the focus of the most controversy in the Senate. Republicans have charged that the grants are little more than pork for key Democratic constituency groups.

Clinton’s willingness to scale back his stimulus plan, designed to create 500,000 jobs over the next year, raises questions about his ability to sell Congress on an even more ambitious long-term economic agenda and on his health care reform initiative. In fact, the Administration is already considering whether to scale back or defer key elements of the President’s long-term plan because of tough budget constraints.

“The botched stimulus drive does signal . . . increased White House difficulty in enacting its (overall) economic program,” political analyst Kevin Phillips wrote in his newsletter, the American Political Report.

In attempting to enact his more far-reaching programs, Clinton will continue to confront the hard realities of political arithmetic--specifically, that he is three Democrats short of the 60 votes he needs to proceed in the Senate. With anything short of that, he will always face the prospect of a crippling filibuster, such as the one that has kept his economic stimulus package in limbo for several weeks.

Senators of both parties fault the President for attempting to get his program through on Democratic votes alone, rather than tailoring it to win the support of a few moderate Republicans as well. In passing his budget resolution, for example, Senate Democrats beat back dozens of politically popular GOP-backed amendments, depriving the minority of even a single victory.

The Republicans blocked the next piece of Clinton’s program--the stimulus package--with a filibuster. Such a confrontational tactic is highly unusual at the outset of a new Administration, when lawmakers of both parties traditionally give a newly elected President what he wants.

The stimulus package was a relatively easy target, however, because it called for new spending that would increase the federal budget deficit--at a time when Clinton was publicly arguing that his overall plan emphasized deficit reduction. At the same time, the stimulus had spending provisions that were difficult for Clinton to link to efforts to improve the nation’s economic strength. And many were vulnerable to Republican charges that the stimulus was a pork barrel bill.

Republicans were able to attack the block grants--which give money to cities with virtually no strings attached--because major cities had issued a wish list of projects that seemed easy to deride: building swimming pools, resurfacing tennis courts and building a warming hut for an ice skating rink. The attacks forced Democrats to amend the stimulus bill to require federal approval and oversight of local programs funded through the block grants, but that was not enough to satisfy the Republicans.

Clinton’s best hope now is to win the support of enough moderate Republicans to break the filibuster. Toward that end, he is planning to stump for his economic package today in Pennsylvania, the home state of Republican Sen. Arlen Specter. The senator will be out of the country, but Susan Lamontagne of his office said that Clinton’s revised package has not satisfied Specter’s concerns about boosting spending without making offsetting budget cuts.

She noted that Specter is strongly committed to most programs in the package and even broke ranks with former President George Bush in supporting such items as summer youth employment. However, she said, he cannot support increasing the deficit to fund them.

Republicans continued to pound away with tough talk Friday. “The President has given us a new proposal which glazes the ham but does not cut the fat,” said Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.).

“If these programs are important, let’s pay for them,” Gramm said. “If they’re not important, let’s don’t raise the deficit to fund more spending. We already have $300 billion worth of deficit spending. If that’s a stimulus, why haven’t we reached economic heaven?”

At the same time, Democratic support appears to be weakening, with a handful of senators already indicating that they may not support the stimulus package. Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and both Wisconsin senators, Russell D. Feingold and Herbert Kohl, have expressed serious reservations, citing concerns about the deficit. A fourth Democrat, Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, has opposed the plan all along and has voted with Republicans on votes that would have ended their filibuster.

The stimulus package is the sort of deficit-financed domestic spending that Congress has leaped at in past years. The Administration initially had expected it to be the single most popular part of Clinton’s economic program.

The reversal of conventional political wisdom reflects in large measure the potency of the message of sacrifice and deficit reduction voiced last year by independent presidential candidate Ross Perot. In fact, many lawmakers now see themselves under the shadow of Perot’s continued presence on the political stage and believe that their success or failure to tame the deficit may be the single biggest factor on which they will be judged in the next elections.

Clinton’s Revised Package

In an effort to appease Republican critics of his $16.3-billion economic stimulus plan, President Clinton offered Friday to scale back the overall package to $12 billion. But he designated several key provisions as off-limits to reductions, proposing to concentrate the cuts in remaining areas. In addition, the President offered to include a new item, $200 million in grants to finance new police hires and other local law enforcement programs.

OFF-LIMITS TO REDUCTIONS

Unemployment compensation extension

Federal highway program

Summer youth employment

Wastewater treatment facilities

Childhood immunization

Ryan White Act (AIDS treatment)

Small Business Administration loans

Food safety and inspection

SOME OF THE ITEMS NOW SUBJECT TO CUTS

Community Development Block Grants

Pell education grants