Dole Abruptly Calls for Delay in Senate Welfare Debate : Legislation: Majority leader is unable to strike a compromise among GOP to complete action before August recess. He intends to offer revised measure.

Trying to buy time to close a split among GOP moderates and conservatives, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) Tuesday abruptly abandoned his pledge to complete action on welfare reform before the August recess.

Dole made the decision after it became clear that he would not be able to strike a compromise among Republicans and complete action on the measure in time to let senators begin their summer vacation by the end of the week.

As senators continued hours of passionate debate on the Senate floor, the majority leader met behind closed doors to try to bridge the gap between welfare reforms sought by moderate and conservative members of his party.

By Tuesday evening, only 34 of the Senate’s 54 Republicans were committed to supporting the legislation.

After announcing the delay, Dole said that he would continue to negotiate with members of his party over the next couple of days and that he intends to introduce a revised measure on Friday.

“I think that at that point we would be, hopefully, very very close to having every Republican on board,” Dole said.

The decision to postpone action was viewed as a temporary setback for Dole, normally a master at brokering legislative agreements, and it complicated chances of passage of a welfare measure this year.

Moderate Republicans were attempting to include guarantees that children whose parents are forced to work would be provided with day care. They also sought to require states to continue to contribute their own funds to their welfare programs.

Conservative Republicans, led by Dole’s main competitor for the party’s presidential nomination, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), pressed for provisions forbidding states to grant cash benefits to teen-age mothers or to increase the size of assistance checks for welfare parents who have additional babies.

Dole initially blamed Democrats for stalling but the criticism rang hollow, considering that Republicans control the floor and have failed to introduce a single amendment or to initiate a single roll call vote in two days of debate.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) embraced Dole’s decision to delay action and conceded that Democrats are not willing to wrap up debate on such an important measure in one week.

“It’s too big an issue” to rush it through, Daschle told reporters. “No one’s holding it up, but everyone wants a chance to be heard.”

The GOP measure, which is similar to one that already passed in the House, would bring major change to the nation’s welfare system by giving states authority to design their own programs to move recipients from welfare to work and by setting the first-ever limit on welfare eligibility--five years in a lifetime.

Democrats call the measure “phony” because it requires states to put people to work without providing resources for child care and job training. The measure would cut federal welfare costs by $70 billion over seven years, an amount equal to about 10% of overall welfare spending. The minority party has introduced its own alternate measure.

Democrats were eager to point to Dole’s decision to postpone deliberations as a concession of the deep flaws in the GOP welfare reform measure.

“No welfare reform bill that fails to deal effectively with child care and job training deserves to pass,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said on the floor after Dole announced the delay. “It is no surprise, therefore, that this defective legislation is being recalled for massive repairs.”

Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, saw the delay as a chance to continue to press their leaders to include provisions that they believe are essential to enable the government to fight out-of-wedlock births.

Gramm, in an intense speech on the floor, outlined the threat to American society that out-of-wedlock births represent and criticized Dole for failing to attack the problem directly. Gramm and others characterized the growth of out-of-wedlock births as the central reason welfare has become a way of life for millions of Americans.

Senate observers and analysts said that one of the main reasons Dole postponed action was media reports suggesting that Gramm had staked out the conservative high ground. Both men are about to hit the trail in a campaign that many expect will be won by the candidate who claims credit for the biggest slice of the conservative agenda.

“Whenever you talk about Sen. Dole these days, regardless of the context, you always have to have in the back of your mind that his focus is winning the presidency,” said Burdett Loomis, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas and longtime observer of Dole.

“The legislative Bob Dole could have found a way to compromise with moderates and Democrats and create a product. But that’s not the only Bob Dole that’s operating right now. The Bob Dole presidential candidate can’t give nearly as much to moderates and Democrats.”

Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington policy and research organization, said that Gramm has clearly put himself in a position of “offering the amendments and drawing a line between himself and Dole.”

Dole told reporters, however, that--despite the concerns of conservatives--he does not expect to alter the bill to require states to cut benefits to teen-age mothers or parents on welfare who have additional babies. Dole has argued that the states should be able to make such a decision and that he has aligned himself with the wishes of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, who fear that the measures could increase abortion.

As the two Republican factions circled each other Tuesday, however, there were strong signs that, given enough time, they will come together. Moderate and conservative Republicans alike, including Gramm, said that their differences do not ultimately threaten the drive to reform welfare.

In the end, said moderate GOP Sen. John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, “all the Republicans will be united.”