House Liberals’ Resistance Slows Action on Crime Bill

Resistance from liberals in the House to the sweeping anti-crime bill passed in the Senate last fall has dashed the Clinton Administration’s hopes for immediate congressional action, sources in the White House and Congress said Wednesday.

Rather than seeking an early conference to resolve differences between the two houses on how best to combat crime, the House Democratic leadership--under pressure from liberals led by the Congressional Black Caucus--has agreed to the unusual tactic of first conducting hearings on the Senate bill and then passing an alternative House bill, sources said.

“If you don’t have a comprehensive House bill, the House will be at a disadvantage in the conference with the Senate in producing a final version of the legislation,” a senior House aide said.

The House last fall passed a series of crime bills that were more narrow and less punitive than the massive Senate bill, which would provide billions of dollars to pay for new prisons, “boot camps” for young offenders and 100,000 additional police officers.

In a sign of the rising division, the Black Caucus has scheduled a daylong seminar today to explore alternatives to the Senate legislation, which passed by a 95-4 vote last November. Last weekend, a conference of black Americans convened by the Rev. Jesse Jackson sharply criticized the $22-billion Senate bill for focusing too heavily on punishment and not enough on social programs aimed at deterring crime.

In the Senate and the White House, supporters of prompt action remain cautiously optimistic that public demand will contain the rebellion and compel the House to move quickly.

House members “think they are going to spend a couple of months holding hearings, going through the process, rewriting their own bill, coming up with their own initiatives,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said. “What’s going to happen, I bet, is there is going to be a conference by the end of February and there will be a bill on the President’s desk by the middle of March. They are so far behind the curve (in the House) they don’t understand what is going on.”

White House aides said Clinton will make clear his insistence on early action, beginning with his State of the Union Address on Jan. 25. “He is going to say, ‘Do it, and do it quickly,’ ” one White House aide familiar with planning for the address said.

Reflecting White House concerns, the senior House aide said the Democratic leadership intends to keep the House legislation on a tight schedule--though not quite as tight as the one Biden predicted. Although deadlines may slip, the aide said, the aim is to go to conference and have a compromise bill on Clinton’s desk before the Easter recess on March 28.

The uprising in the House has placed Clinton in a political cross-fire on the highly charged issue. At a time when public concern about crime has surged, Republican congressional leaders have intensified pressure on Clinton to endorse the key provisions of the Senate bill.

But black leaders, already annoyed over Administration policies on cities, civil rights and welfare reform, are drawing a sharper line in opposition to the Senate measure.

“In some inner cities, the incarceration rate approaches 3,000 (per 100,000 people) at an average cost of $25,000 a year,” said Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Va.), one of the conveners of today’s Black Caucus hearing. “It seems absolutely insane to take initiatives to increase the incarceration rate.”

In the end, one Senate aide closely involved with the issue said, the President has to decide whether he wants to risk criticism from congressional Republicans or the Black Caucus.

The measure approved by the Senate last November included funds for 100,000 additional police officers, as Clinton had promised during his presidential campaign, and a massive increase in spending for incarceration, with $3 billion allocated to boot camps and another $3 billion to the construction of regional prisons for state prisoners. States would be able to send prisoners to the new institutions only if they passed sentencing guidelines requiring violent offenders to serve at least 85% of their terms.

In addition, the measure would expand the federal death penalty for about 50 more crimes, impose new mandatory minimum sentences, require life sentences without parole for any criminal convicted of three violent felonies and make virtually any crime committed with a handgun a federal offense.

Though overshadowed by the avalanche of new punishments, the bill also contained $8.5 billion for prevention programs, such as anti-gang efforts, Biden’s staff calculated.

But the Black Caucus and other House liberals are arguing that the balance should be further shifted toward social programs. “You’ve got to look at what’s causing people to get into the criminal justice system in the first place,” said Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.), a black freshman on the House Judiciary Committee.

The Administration’s position has been complicated by divisions between the White House and the Justice Department over how much Clinton should seek to redirect the stern Senate bill. Generally, sources said, White House aides have been more willing to accommodate the Senate bill than has the Justice Department, which is more sympathetic to shifting additional resources toward prevention.

On several aspects of the Senate bill, however, the Administration is aligned with the House Democrats and Biden in their desire for changes. All want to delete as impractical the Senate’s call for expanded federal penalties for crimes committed with handguns.

Similarly, all consider as misguided the Senate provisions requiring states to significantly lengthen prison terms as the price of access to the new regional federal prisons. State officials have complained that the provision would impose on them additional incarceration costs vastly exceeding the savings they could expect from transferring prisoners to the new federal facilities.

Even some House liberals are ambivalent about pursuing their own bill. Noting that the bill as approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee was pushed substantially to the right when it went to the Senate floor, one aide to a liberal representative said some members still are questioning “whether we really want to put ourselves through that in the House.”

If the House passes a more liberal bill, the Senate would be unlikely to approve many of its provisions. To discourage House liberals from seeking too sweeping a rewrite of the Senate bill, sources said, Biden is promising to provide additional funds for social programs and prevention in the anti-drug legislation that is scheduled for consideration later this year.