Lawmakers Start Budget Showdown : Congress: Republican leaders seek unanimous party support for historic measure that will scale back social programs, cut taxes. Clinton renews his veto pledge.

Facing a new veto threat by President Clinton, Congress opened a historic debate Wednesday on the Republican majority’s revolutionary agenda to curb federal spending and reverse three decades of deficit spending. The far-reaching plan, if implemented, is supposed to deliver by the year 2002 a balanced budget for the first time since 1969.

“I’ve been waiting 40 years for this . . . defining moment,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) characterized the debate and upcoming votes on the giant budget bill--set for today in the House and Friday in the Senate--as an “extraordinary 48 hours” that amount to change “on the same scale of the Great Society.”

Rolled into the so-called reconciliation bill are provisions to dramatically scale back the growth of Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and a host of other assistance programs. The measure also incorporates tax cuts that have already been approved separately by the House and Senate, but it does not include spending channeled through 13 separate appropriation bills covering the Defense Department, the Interior Department and other agencies.

Unable to derail the GOP juggernaut, outnumbered but energized Democrats pressed their campaign of resistance in the court of public opinion, attacking Republicans for effecting unprecedented changes in Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and other social programs without adequate public scrutiny or debate while at the same time providing a $245-billion tax cut for the well-to-do.

“This is a tragic day and an historic day. But I think it is a day the Republicans will regret,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), referring to the 1996 elections.

Daschle said the GOP’s plan to cut $482 billion from the projected seven-year growth in spending for Medicare and Medicaid amounted to “the biggest rollback of health benefits this country has experienced in its history.”

Clinton on Wednesday renewed his intention to veto the measure, saying that the GOP’s “misguided budget priorities” were “the wrong way to go, and I don’t intend to let it happen.”

At a White House press conference, Clinton described the Republican budget as “extreme” and said it “absolutely shreds our values. . . .”

The budget bill before Congress is the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda, and it dwarfs any other matter that either the Senate or the House has taken up this year in the wake of the GOP’s stunning election victories last November, in which voters gave them control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

“This is clearly a historic vote,” said House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) as he opened debate in the House. “This is our chance to restore fiscal sanity and to guarantee economic security for this country.”

The omnibus bill wraps into one “reconciliation” measure a staggering array of provisions to cut taxes and spending in programs that reach deeply into the federal government’s role in American society and the nation’s economy.

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Aside from curbing spending for Medicare and Medicaid, the bill would scale back the earned income tax credit for the working poor and convert federal welfare spending into block grants to states. Other provisions would open the Alaska wilderness to oil drilling, abolish the Commerce Department and impose new fees on student loans.

In the Senate on Wednesday, the GOP-dominated chamber debated into the evening the first of a slew of Democratic amendments aimed at lessening the cuts, including one that would reduce the Medicare spending reductions to $89 billion.

But Senate Democrats harbored no illusions about the chances of any of their amendments actually passing.

“We just feel very strongly that the record should reflect where Democrats stand,” Daschle said.

In the face of such Democratic attacks, Republicans remained fixated on their goal and the future.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici ardently defended the spending reductions by arguing that future generations will suffer if Clinton and his fellow Democrats succeeded in forcing Republicans to abandon their revolution and retain the status quo.

“Do we want to pay our debts or do we want our children and grandchildren to pay for the government we want to give to people but can’t afford?” Domenici said in an impassioned floor speech.

Earlier in the day, Gingrich and Dole, in an unusual joint meeting of House and Senate Republicans, indicated that their aim was not merely to win passage of the budget but to do so with unanimous support from their party.

To that end, they spent a good portion of the day negotiating with moderates and other members of their own party in hopes of overcoming objections that assorted pet programs were being cut too steeply.

House Republicans managed to sweep away one of the last major obstacles to passage when a group of farm-state Republicans agreed to vote for the budget measure despite their opposition to the bill’s major changes in federal farm subsidies.

“There is a lot more in reconciliation that I support than that I oppose,” said Rep. Bill Emerson (R-Mo.), a leading opponent of the farm provisions.

Republicans predicted that agreement guarantees GOP victory when the bill comes to a vote in the House. “They’re going to have the votes,” said Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), a leadership lieutenant.

In the Senate, Majority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) suggested that concessions would be made to win the votes of GOP moderates, but not until the eleventh hour.

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“We’re not going to do it until the last minute,” he said, adding that to do otherwise would invite the moderates--and perhaps others--to come forward with still more demands.

Dole agreed. “We can’t add every small concern that somebody has,” he said during a joint press conference with Gingrich after their closed-door meeting with fellow Republicans.

The leaders also hinted broadly at the strategy they are pursuing in seeking to win over GOP moderates, noting that many details in the reconciliation bill can be handled when a conference committee meets to rectify differences between the House and Senate bills.

“Some things have to wait for conference,” Dole said. “You can do anything in conference.” That’s also the tack House leaders took in appeasing critics of their farm provisions: They assured them that changes would be made in conference with the Senate, where the budget bill includes far less drastic changes in farm programs.

To further foster GOP unity heading into today’s showdown vote in the House, GOP leaders on Wednesday pulled from the floor schedule two unrelated measures that threatened to reopen intraparty feuding. One pertained to a proposal to sharply restrict enforcement of environmental regulations; the other was a proposal to ban lawmakers from receiving gifts from lobbyists.

“We don’t want a big fight among Republicans the day before the reconciliation vote,” said House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

* MEDICARE PREDICTION

Newt Gingrich says traditional Medicare will “wither.” A16

* Times staff writers Elizabeth Shogren and Paul Richter contributed to this story.