House GOP OKs Tougher Rules for Tax Hikes

House Republicans approved a plan Wednesday that would require a three-fifths majority to pass any future income tax increases as well as impose other sweeping reforms in the rules that have long governed the House.

The revisions, which would abolish more than a score of committees and subcommittees and impose term limits on committee chairmen, must still be adopted by the full House in January on a simple majority vote. But passage appeared assured after the overwhelming endorsement they received from the House Republican Conference.

With Democrats still smarting from Republican plans to cut off all funding to legislative interest groups such as the Hispanic and Congressional Black caucuses, the new GOP majority continued on the last day of its organizational meetings to rewrite the rule books in ways that are likely to have a profound impact on the manner in which the House conducts business.

“Some people wondered whether we would come in and just rearrange the furniture or if we would really change the place,” said incoming lawmaker Sue Myrick of North Carolina, one of 73 GOP freshmen who were a driving force behind the changes. “Now they know we meant what we said.”

Scrambling to play catch up while incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) continues to dominate the headlines, the new Senate majority leader, Bob Dole (R-Kan.), told reporters that the Senate’s agenda would be equally revolutionary when the new Congress convenes in January.

While he warned that Senate rules would oblige the upper chamber to work at a slower and more deliberative pace than the House, Dole said his first legislative priorities would be a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, congressional accountability and reforms to protect states from the burdens of unfunded federal mandates.

Dole, however, was more circumspect about passing a middle-class tax cut. He said that while he favors such a measure, it needs to be offset by budget cuts to keep the federal deficit from expanding. “We do have to pay for it,” he said.

But a similar sense of caution was no where in evidence in the House, where the Republicans met behind closed doors to approve an array of rules changes that they intend to pass on the floor on Jan. 4, the first day of the new Congress.

Among the reforms endorsed by voice votes were:

* A requirement that no bill containing a personal or corporate tax-rate increase can pass the House unless at least 261 members, a three-fifths majority, vote for it. Republicans believe that by requiring approval by more than a simple majority of 218 votes, they can head off many new taxes. The proposal is expected to face Democratic opposition.

* A sweeping overhaul of the once all-powerful committee structure to limit chairmen to no more than three two-year terms as the heads of their committees and a ban on all proxy voting.

* Staff cuts and restructuring to eliminate three House committees and more than 20 subcommittees, while renaming many others and cutting overall committee staff levels by a third. Many of the subcommittees were created two decades ago when an equally activist class of freshmen Democrats, swept to power in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, moved to curtail the power of the House leadership.

* A “sunshine” rule barring chairmen from closing their committee meetings to the public unless such secrecy is necessary to protect national security or prevent the disclosure of confidential law enforcement information.

All of these reforms were included in the GOP’s pre-election “contract with America,” which the House Republicans promised to take up within the first 100 days of the legislative year. While their approval by the new GOP members came as no surprise, the three-day meeting was significant for the way it signaled the new majority’s resolve to make good on the procedural proposals contained in the 10-point contract.

“If we don’t continue to reform, we’ll soon find ourselves stuck in the same dismal swamp the Democrats found themselves stuck in last month--reviled and rejected by the American people,” said incoming Rules Committee Chairman Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y.), who noted that the reforms endorsed by the conference represented the “most comprehensive overhaul” of House rules in nearly 50 years.

Taken together “these changes could have a dramatic and very consequential (impact) on the House,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The overall effect will be to move the House in a direction that “strengthens the ability of the majority leadership to set an agenda and act on it.”

In that sense, the changes all appeared to be in line with Gingrich’s attempt to centralize power under his leadership in a way that no Speaker has in many years.

“I think we all underestimated him,” a senior Democratic lawmaker said of Gingrich’s ability to keep his party “marching in lock-step.” Gingrich has gotten off “to a very fast and aggressive start, one that is going to pose a major challenge both for us and for President Clinton.”

Most of the Democratic Angst , however, was not over the predictable approval of the procedural changes promised in the “contract with America,” but over a complementary set of changes that were drafted later and endorsed by the GOP conference.

These included limits barring members from sitting on more than two committees and four subcommittees and, most controversial of all, a decision to cut all public funding for 28 legislative service organizations that include the influential caucuses formed by African American, Latino and female legislators, as well as key policy research groups on which the Democrats particularly had come to rely over the years.

The furor over the GOP proposal to deny funding and office space to the Hispanic and the Congressional Black caucuses and to research organizations such as the Democratic Study Group continued to build Wednesday, with Democrats decrying the move as partisan and ideologically motivated.

Denouncing the GOP leadership as the new “philosophy police” of Congress, Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) said the Republicans were trying to undercut the increasing influence that minority groups had amassed in the previous Congress.

Hispanic Caucus Chairman Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) called it a “mean, reactionary and extreme” recommendation that “borders on being racist.”

Republicans, who have long been critical of what they charged were the caucuses’ sloppy accounting practices and wasteful spending patterns, dismissed the Democratic uproar as a “stirred up fuss mostly about nothing,” in the words of Rep. Pat Roberts of Kansas. They maintained that most of the caucuses would still be able to function off of Capitol Hill through private contributions, and they said the cutbacks would save taxpayers more than $5 million a year.

But the Democrats, and most independent observers, disputed that assertion by noting that the groups had been funded in the past with dues paid from members’ congressional office accounts. Because the amounts of taxpayer money to each member to run his or her office will not change, barring a portion of it from being used to support the special-interest groups “will not save taxpayers one dime,” Serrano said.

Mfume also predicted that the move would backfire on Republicans by re-energizing dispirited Democrats in the 41-member Congressional Black Caucus.

“They may be able to steal and snatch away our funding, but they will never be able to steal and snatch away our spirit. . . . In the case of the CBC, they have created 41 pit bulls who will chase this issue day in and day out” for the next two years, Mfume said.

‘Contract With America’

The full text of the Republican “contract with America” is available on the TimesLink on-line service. Also available are biographies of Newt Gingrich and up-and-coming GOP leaders. Sign on and click “Special Reports” in the Nation & World section.