Senate Stumbles to Halt in Welter of Partisan Disputes

The Senate skidded to a bitterly partisan halt Friday, its debate over spending cuts ensnared in a complicated political imbroglio involving aid to the poor, assistance for the Mexican economy, defense spending and tax loopholes for the rich.

Fearing that the standoff could hurt his bid for the 1996 GOP presidential nomination, Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) lashed out at Democrats for opposing the spending cuts and recessed the Senate so he could go to New Hampshire to campaign.

*

“Only in the Senate could things get so Byzantine,” lamented a Senate aide.

Still unresolved are a bill that would cut $15 billion from federal spending this year, a GOP effort to scuttle President Clinton’s $20-billion Mexico aid package and a tax measure to help the self-employed buy health insurance.

After the Senate voted to kill $1.8 billion in construction funding across the country, the spending cuts bill was tied up in partisan knots over how much to cut from child care and educational programs that aid the poor. Mexico aid became a part of the tangle when Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) introduced an amendment Thursday that would prevent the Administration from helping the Mexican economy. The separate tax measure was paralyzed by a dispute over a loophole that allows wealthy Americans to dodge taxes by renouncing their citizenship.

Keenly aware his presidential hopes could be hurt by the appearance of a Senate in continual gridlock, Dole railed at Democrats on the floor of the Senate. Off the floor, the majority leader, who backs the Mexico aid plan, fumed over D’Amato’s amendment.

Dole threatened to hold up other legislation, including a defense supplemental appropriation that the Pentagon says it badly needs, if the Democrats do not drop their opposition to the spending cuts and tax measures.

“We’re not going to bring up any more bills that the White House wants until we have some understanding on the legislation we thought would go through here in a normal way,” Dole said. “If he (the President) doesn’t want this (spending cuts) bill, that’s fine with me. We’re not going to take it up. But neither are we going to take up legislation that he does want.”

The threat to delay the bill--which would give the Pentagon about $2 billion to pay the costs of its peacekeeping missions in Haiti and Somalia--only appeared to increase the political tangle.

President Clinton, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, fired off a letter to Dole asking him not to “hold the readiness of our armed forces hostage to other debates.” The Pentagon has warned that without the funds, training and combat readiness will suffer.

“The Pentagon needs this money right away, and to punish the Pentagon because he (Dole) wants to punish Democrats . . . is to play a dangerous game,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said.

*

Even some of the majority leader’s GOP allies said that the threat to withhold money from the Pentagon was a mistake. They said that they understand Dole’s frustration, given the political stakes. But threatening the defense bill “seems politically petulant at best” and, for a Republican presidential aspirant, irresponsible at worst, one GOP source said.

After Democrats--angered by what they saw as a partisan move to embarrass Clinton--threatened a filibuster Thursday to block the D’Amato amendment on Mexico aid, Republicans agreed to set it aside until next week so that debate on the spending bill could proceed. But work ground to a halt again Friday when Daschle sought to restore $1.3 billion in funds that the bill cuts from Head Start and other programs for children.

If the funding is not restored, Daschle threatened, Democrats would offer a series of time-consuming amendments to protect individual programs scheduled to be cut under the bill.

Charging that the Democrats were mounting what amounted to a filibuster, Dole threatened to pull the legislation from the floor. That would allow Republicans to attack Democrats for denying disaster assistance to California, a state that Clinton needs to carry in his reelection bid next year, since the cuts are intended to free up funds to pay for federal disaster aid.

While that dispute was being negotiated off the floor, the Senate took up a measure, approved by the House on Thursday, that would permit the self-employed to continue to deduct 25% of their health insurance premiums from their taxes. But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) objected to the elimination of a provision of the measure that would have imposed a punitive tax on multimillionaires who seek to evade taxes by renouncing their U.S. citizenship.

When the Republicans refused to let Kennedy offer a non-binding resolution expressing the Senate’s resolve to close that tax loophole, Democrats said that they would filibuster the bill. Dole ordered a vote Monday to stop it.