Republicans Temper Talk of Changes : Politics: After a week of boasting about a new day in Congress, GOP leaders admit many goals are out of reach. Some ideas will be blocked by Clinton, phased in or modified.

Republican congressional leaders, having spent most of the past week boasting about what they can accomplish with their new majorities, acknowledged Sunday that there are probably many things they can’t get done.

Even though they now control both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, GOP lawmakers said that many items on their conservative agenda might still be out of reach.

“A lot of people are feeling their oats these days,” said Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, soon to be majority leader. “Not everything is going to happen.”

Speaking on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” he added: “Some of these things we’ll have to phase in, or change or modify.”

Boosting defense spending, slashing farm subsidies, restricting abortions, removing the ban on assault weapons--all these and more will face formidable obstacles when the new Republican-controlled Congress convenes in January, GOP leaders said.

One of the highest hurdles is the Democrat who still lives in the White House. The Republicans predicted that President Clinton will not hesitate to exercise his veto power and that it will be difficult for them to muster the two-thirds majorities in both houses necessary to override those vetoes.

For example, Clinton will almost certainly block any attempt to eliminate the ban on assault weapons or to repeal the Brady law, which requires a waiting period to purchase a firearm, said Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.).

“I think it’s clear that the President is not going to sign that,” Gramm said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.” However, Gramm stressed that the GOP will try to change recently passed anti-crime legislation, which includes the waiting period and the assault-weapon ban, by stripping “all the social spending.”

Beyond their anticipated difficulties with Clinton, Republicans differ among themselves on many issues.

For example, Rep. Bill Archer (R-Tex.), the likely new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has spoken of abolishing the federal income tax in favor of a value-added tax or some other form of national sales tax. But several of his Republican colleagues--not to mention Democrats--have already declared their opposition.

“It’s not on my agenda,” Gramm said on the NBC program, adding: “We want to reform the tax system, but our first order of business has got to be to stop the spending, to put the federal government on a budget, to let working people keep what they earn.

Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.), who is likely to become House majority leader, attacked the value-added tax as “insidious” and said he would fight any attempt to pass one.

“It is a tax by which you hide the cost of government from the people who pay for the cost of government,” he said on “John McLaughlin’s One on One,” a syndicated TV program.

“And the only value is that the people who levy the tax can strip the down off the goose with the least amount of squawk.”

Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), the majority leader until the new Congress convenes in January, agreed that a national sales tax is “not going to fly, and it’s a bad idea.”

Speaking on the NBC program, he added that if such a plan were approved, “people at the bottom of the ladder, people in the middle class, will pay a much larger proportion of taxes.”

GOP leaders said a middle-class tax cut, a leading item on the GOP agenda, is not imminent. It “won’t happen overnight,” Dole said.

House Speaker-in-waiting Newt Gingrich of Georgia, speaking on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” said that income tax increases approved in 1990 and 1993 are not likely to be repealed, much as he opposed them.

“I voted against both,” Gingrich said. “Why would I favor keeping things I voted against?”

But asked if they could be rolled back, Gingrich replied: “No. Not in the near future, but we’ll look at that in the long run.”

Gramm said it would be especially difficult to repeal the 1993 tax rate increase for those in the top income bracket. “I’d like to (change it), but we’re going to have to have one more election to make that possible,” a reference to the 1996 presidential election.

Despite the Republican pledge to balance the federal budget, Gramm said the party will not tamper with the government’s costliest program--Social Security--in the near future. But he did not rule out changes in the long term.

“I don’t have any interest in changing Social Security,” he said, “except when we have to after the turn of the century as we look toward a financial problem.”

Dole, acknowledging that it would be “very, very difficult” to balance the budget without touching Social Security, admitted: “Social Security is off the table. . . . The past election in effect took Social Security off the table.”

Gingrich said agricultural subsidies, on every budget cutter’s list of programs that could be slashed or even eliminated, are politically out of reach as long as the European Union generously subsidizes its farmers.

“I don’t think you can unilaterally disarm American farmers any more than you’d unilaterally disarm the military,” he said.

On the sensitive issue of defense spending, Dole said the Republicans could probably do little more than stop further cutbacks.

“If we’re going to increase defense spending, it may be very, very slowly,” he said. “Maybe it’ll just be keeping what we have.”

Republicans also said there appeared to be no consensus for a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion--although they insisted that Congress would maintain restrictions against the use of federal funds to pay for the procedure--or for legislation overturning the family leave law, which requires firms employing more than 50 workers to grant employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually to care for a new child or seriously ill family member.

Gramm said he feels the family-leave measure is seriously flawed.

“I think it hurts women in the work force. I think it imposes a burden on small business. But in terms of looking at regulations like that, I think we’ve got to do it in a regulatory reform effort, where we look at all laws on a cross-industry basis, rather than individual bills.”