Senate Votes, 99-0, for $16-Billion Plan to Cut Spending

Breaking more than a week of partisan stalemate on the eve of a two-week Easter recess, the Senate late Thursday approved a $16-billion package of spending cuts to help pay for deficit reduction and to offset the costs of disaster relief in California.

Brokered by Senate leaders and supported by the White House, the package was approved by a unanimous vote of 99 to 0 after a modest round of changes was negotiated to appease liberal Democrats who had been threatening to scuttle the bill.

“It’s an agreement we all can support,” Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said.

The deal also cleared the way for passage of other stalled legislation as the senators threw themselves into a last-minute sprint to complete action on backlogged bills before the recess. These included a $3.1-billion bill to reimburse the Pentagon for the cost of its peacekeeping operations in Haiti and Somalia and legislation creating a control board to oversee the District of Columbia’s fiscal crisis, both of which were passed by voice votes.

The legislation eliminates the prospect of greater local autonomy for the District for many years and would make the most sweeping changes in the District government since Congress granted limited home rule in 1973.

To secure Democratic support, the eleventh-hour compromise negotiated on the spending-cut package would restore $835 million to more than a dozen federal housing, education and child-care programs that Republicans had sought to cut. In return, Democrats agreed to increase the amount of deficit reduction in the bill from about $8 billion to nearly $9 billion.

The remainder of savings achieved by the $16 billion in spending cuts would be used to offset an Administration request for $275 million in debt forgiveness for Jordan and $6.7 billion in disaster aid for California.

The new agreement meant steeper cuts in other areas, mostly from funds earmarked for federal administrative and travel costs.

The Senate bill would cut only about $1 billion less than an earlier House bill but it would preserve many of the anti-poverty programs that House members had voted to cut. The differing versions must be reconciled by a Senate-House conference committee when Congress returns from its spring break later this month.

Although the Senate compromise was supported by the White House, Daschle warned that President Clinton still might veto the bill if the House version is adopted by the conference committee.

As part of the compromise, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) agreed to withdraw an amendment that would have forced the Administration to renege on its pledge to put together a $20-billion package to help rescue Mexico’s faltering economy.

The D’Amato proposal nearly scuttled the spending-cut package earlier in the week, as the Administration’s Democratic allies sought to defeat it. And Democratic senators nearly brought the package down again after Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Daschle announced Wednesday night that they had reached a compromise on the spending cuts after a week of negotiations.

That agreement would have provided for both slightly bigger cuts in the anti-poverty programs that Democrats sought to protect and slightly less deficit reduction than is contained in the final deal. But rank-and-file Democrats rejected the leadership deal, saying that it still cut too deeply into social spending, and new negotiations were necessary.

“It’s more than numbers. It’s policy, it’s principle. It’s a question of what you stand for,” said Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.).

“These negotiations started a week ago and here we are empty-handed,” complained Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) before the final agreement. The Senate, he said angrily, was about “to collapse into a puddle of nothingness.”

Rejection of the first compromise was clearly an embarrassment to both leaders--to Daschle, who spent the day trying to quell the rebellion within his party’s ranks by liberal senators, and to Dole, whose presidential ambitions could suffer if the Senate seems to be in gridlock under his leadership.

But Republicans wanted to pass the bill before the recess so they could go home to their districts and claim credit for lowering the deficit and setting the stage for a far more ambitious round of spending cuts later in the year. And Clinton wanted passage of the disaster relief money for California, a state crucial to his reelection bid next year.

It was a third factor, however, that seemed finally to break the stalemate: the threat of having to come back to work on Saturday. Most senators had booked themselves on flights for home this morning.

Trying to pressure the Democrats into conceding, Dole threatened repeatedly throughout the week to hold up the defense bill and other legislation until the spending-cut measure had passed. Dole sensed Thursday afternoon, as the recess approached, that he could afford to moderate his rhetoric.

“Be patient, take two aspirins and a nap,” he told colleagues, promising that a compromise would be found.