GOP Begins Revision of ’94 Crime Bill : Congress: House passes first of seven measures designed to rewrite legislation approved last session. Debate gets off to a non-controversial start.

Forging ahead with its “contract with America,” the new Republican majority in the House on Tuesday passed the first of seven measures that together would rewrite the Clinton Administration’s crime bill of 1994, one of its proudest achievements of the last Congress.

Grabbing back an issue that they believed Democrats had stolen from them last year, House Republicans planned to spend the next week or more revising major parts of the crime bill that squeezed through Congress last summer after one of the most divisive and bitterly partisan debates in recent memory.

The first measure, which the GOP calls its “taking back our streets” act, would eliminate funding for most of the crime prevention programs in the earlier legislation and shift the resources to prison construction and block grants that states could spend as they wish.

Democratic critics said the GOP proposals also would eliminate funding for Clinton’s program to put 100,000 more police officers on the streets.

Republicans countered that states still would be able to hire more police under their block grant proposal and argued that their emphasis on more prison funding and stiffer sentencing provisions would constitute more effective deterrents to crime.

But while tough fights over community policing, crime prevention and last year’s narrowly enacted ban on assault weapons appear likely, the debate over the new crime package got off to an easy and non-controversial start with Tuesday’s unanimous passage of a bill to require those convicted of federal crimes to compensate their victims.

Current law allows judges to order criminals to compensate their victims in federal cases. But the Victim Restitution Act passed, 431 to 0, on Tuesday would mandate compensation and make compliance with any court-ordered restitution plan a condition for probation or parole.

Hoping to move the legislation more easily by dividing it into parts, GOP strategists brought their “taking back our streets” bill to the House floor as seven separate bills. The first three are relatively non-controversial and are expected to be easily approved. They include measures to expedite the deportation of criminal immigrants and to allow into evidence information obtained without search warrants.

But the real fights are expected to begin Thursday and stretch into next week when the House takes up GOP measures designed to consolidate the Clinton bill’s $14 billion in law enforcement and prevention spending--most of it to hire more police--into a smaller, $10-billion block grant that states could spend on crime reduction measures of their choice.

Democrats, backed by the nation’s largest police unions, said the measure would all but eliminate the community policing program that was the centerpiece of Clinton’s crime bill and which, they say, already is making dramatic gains in reducing crime.

Hoping to avoid a divisive fight over gun control like the one that split the House and nearly brought down Clinton’s crime bill last year, GOP strategists put off until spring a vote to repeal a ban on 19 assault-style weapons--a repeal that Clinton has said he will veto.