Gingrich Vows House Vote on Clinton Budget

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), striking a conciliatory tone in marked contrast to the initial reactions of many congressional Democrats, on Wednesday promised he will shepherd President Clinton’s balanced-budget proposal to the House floor for a vote by the GOP-dominated chamber.

Although most of the specifics of the President’s spending plan will certainly be defeated, the Speaker praised Clinton for taking “a very encouraging first step” and vowed “to find every good idea” in the proposal “and absorb them” into the GOP’s own effort to balance the federal budget.

Meanwhile, as congressional Democrats continued their harsh and open criticism of the President’s recent efforts at conciliation with the GOP, it was the Republican leadership--the chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees--who met with White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta and Office of Management and Budget Director Alice Rivlin to discuss Clinton’s plan, which the President unveiled in a televised address Tuesday.

Emerging from that meeting Wednesday, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who a day before had pronounced himself a “skeptic” concerning Clinton’s plan, told reporters: “We have concluded that this is a serious proposal.” Domenici directed congressional staff members to pore over the blueprint and report back within the next day or two.

Just three days after Gingrich won high marks for engaging in a remarkably civil debate with the President in New Hampshire, the normally combative House Speaker muted his clear opposition to Clinton’s budget package: He noted simply that Republican leaders “are still committed” to balancing the federal budget in seven years rather than the 10 years that Clinton has proposed. Later in the day, Gingrich called Clinton’s 10-year plan “a non-starter.”

The White House responded to Republican leaders’ conciliatory rhetoric by asserting its own eagerness to deal on the budget issue.

“If there’s a willingness to accept [Clinton’s] good-faith effort . . . there would surely be some give-and-take in the discussion,” said White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry.

But Capitol Hill Democrats continued to chafe at what they saw as Clinton’s abandonment of them in a bid to improve his reelection prospects. Democratic leaders, who fumed quietly over Clinton’s about-face in tactics--switching from confrontational attacks on GOP proposals to a conciliatory approach--on Wednesday struggled to rein in an open revolt by several liberal members who threatened to take their complaints to the House floor.

The President “did a dumb thing Tuesday night,” Rep. Pete Stark (D-Hayward) said bluntly.

“The politics of this are his call, but his Medicare policy is just as bad as the Republicans’. . . . The only difference is that his policy will be bad for 10 years while theirs will be bad for only seven,” Stark said, adding with heavy sarcasm that “other than that, he [Clinton] is a wonderful guy.”

Clinton, like the GOP, has called for reducing the rate of growth in health programs, but by not as much.

However courtly, Gingrich’s remarks Wednesday before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce appeared to vindicate the views of many congressional Democrats who had warned Clinton that his proposal would signal a surrender to Capitol Hill Republicans. “Once you have a President who has agreed to a balanced budget, who’s agreed to the need to reform Medicare, who’s agreed to limit domestic spending, who’s agreed that there should be some tax cuts, whatever the details, those are some fairly big steps,” Gingrich said.

While Republicans were praising Clinton’s latest budget proposals, Democrats were bitterly divided over what many of them clearly saw as an act of political betrayal.

“Shellshock would be a mild description of the reaction” that greeted Clinton’s proposal at a meeting held by House Democrats on Wednesday, one participant said. “To say we went ballistic would be more accurate.”

On the morning after a major Oval Office speech or policy pronouncement, it is customary for lawmakers from the President’s party to flood the congressional press galleries with news releases praising their leader’s words. But Wednesday morning, the racks that usually contain the press releases were conspicuously empty.

A number of Democrats at a stormy policy meeting called by House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) denounced Clinton not only for “caving in” on cutting the growth rates for Medicare and Medicaid spending and ceding to Republican demands to balance the budget by a certain date, but for deserting them politically at a time when their party is struggling to formulate a strategy to win back the House next year.

Privately, Democratic leaders acknowledged that recent actions by Clinton have thrown their efforts to achieve that goal into disarray.

“By meeting with Gingrich [in New Hampshire] over the weekend and now with this, what the President is subliminally saying is that it is OK to have a Republican Congress,” a senior Democratic leader said. “The signal he sent to Democrats [in his budget address Tuesday] is that it’s every man for himself.”

House Democrats in particular had been looking “for a stark contrast with Republicans,” said Washington political analyst Charles Cook. “But now that’s been eliminated.”

But while there were renewed rumblings in the Capitol’s cloakrooms and hallways about the growing “liability” that Clinton could be for Democrats seeking reelection next year, not all members of the President’s party saw their political future in such bleak terms.

In the Senate, centrist Democrats like Sens. John B. Breaux of Louisiana and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut hailed what they said was Clinton’s “courage” in bucking the left-leaning majority of his own party by joining the balanced-budget debate in a constructive way.

“The President did the right thing. He can’t just sit back and criticize the way members of Congress can. He must lead,” Breaux said. “His proposal will make some Democrats mad and some Republicans mad, but in the long run it will be good for the country.”

Clinton also received a vote of confidence from liberal Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of the leading health care experts in the House. “What the President did . . . was to position himself for the inevitable showdown with Republicans later this year,” Waxman said. And he did it without “diminishing the message we want to send, which is that Republicans want to decimate Medicare and Medicaid to give tax cuts to the rich,” he added.

But what looked like a smart strategic maneuver to Waxman continued to look more like an ignoble retreat to many others.