Congress Closes In on Budget Package : Spending: The GOP’s controversial deficit-reduction plan needs only final House vote for approval. A presidential veto is all but certain, however.

Deeply determined to shrink government and cut taxes, congressional Republicans muscled their historic balanced-budget bill to the brink of passage Friday and reacted tepidly to a White House proposal to end a four-day federal shutdown.

With GOP lawmakers cheering the vote, the House ratified the seven-year balanced budget, 237 to 189, almost exclusively along party lines. A few hours later, the Senate concurred, 52 to 47, but with one minor change that requires another vote in the House this weekend.

Even so, Republicans celebrated. “This is truly a historic accomplishment,” said House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the first Republican speaker in four decades. He called it “the most important vote since 1933” when the New Deal was launched. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) called it “the most important” vote of his career.

The measure would squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and other social programs, while leaving room for tax breaks for families and businesses. Democrats said it was tilted unconscionably toward the rich, and President Clinton threatened a veto.

The Senate voted in mid-evening, at the same time key GOP lawmakers reviewed a proposal to end a four-day impasse that has idled hundreds of thousands of federal workers and closed national parks, including Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Democrats offered to agree to talks with a goal of balancing the budget in seven years, but that fell short of GOP demands for a firm commitment.

“We’ve not reached any agreement here. We’re just insisting that we have an honest budget in seven years,” Rep. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Budget Committee, said.

White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, who spent hours in the Capitol, expressed disappointment that the offer hadn’t been accepted. “Both sides have to give a little if, in fact, we’re going to end this crisis,” he said, flanked by leading Democratic lawmakers.

Officials involved in the discussions said the White House, backed by congressional Democrats, had proposed to reopen government and commit to comprehensive talks on a balanced budget.

The proposal said “the goal of the negotiations” would be to balance the budget in seven years--short of the Republican demand for a firmer commitment to balancing the budget.

“They’re talking about goals, time frames and a lot of ambiguous language,” Dole said. “We’ll just have to look at it. It’s going to take awhile.”

The White House put a positive spin on the closed-door talks to end the shutdown that has idled hundreds of thousand of federal employees.

“We’ve got some language that we feel should be acceptable to both sides,” White House spokesman Mike McCurry told reporters.

Participants in the talks, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the White House was proposing discussions aimed at balancing the budget in “seven years under Congressional Budget Office economic assumptions, or in a time frame and under economic assumptions agreed to by negotiators.”

That, too, was short of a GOP demand for a firm commitment for a seven-year plan, carried out under CBO’s estimates for economic growth, inflation and other measurements.

The proposal would also reopen the government through mid-December, presumably to allow for time for the budget talks to bear fruit.

Sen. William Cohen of Maine was the lone Republican to vote against the balanced budget in what was an otherwise straight party-line vote.

The GOP balanced budget bill would change the face of government, cutting many programs, eliminating others and turning over to the states power that has steadily accumulated in Washington in the past six decades.

Culmination of the Republican revolution, it faced a veto threat from Clinton, who attacked it as containing “the biggest Medicare and Medicaid cuts in history, unprecedented cuts in education and the environment and steep tax increases on working families.”

Clinton stood ready to veto a second measure, as well, to reopen until Dec. 5 government services now shut down. But Republicans weren’t letting that one leave the Capitol, even though it cleared both houses on Thursday.

Publicly, Clinton was demanding that lawmakers approve legislation to reopen the government without precondition.

But with lawmakers feeling pressure to restore services and many Democrats privately urging the White House to compromise, Panetta went to the Capitol for discussions.

He spent much of his time consulting with Democrats, many of whom have signaled the White House privately and publicly in recent days it was time to end the standoff with Republicans.

That left hundreds of thousands of government employees furloughed for the fourth straight day in the longest shutdown in federal history, and the pinch was beginning to hurt.

For only the second time in half a century, Yosemite National Park was closed to visitors Friday. Campers, hotel guests and tour buses had to leave the valley at 3 p.m. due to the budget stalemate 3,000 miles away. The only other incidence of park’s closure was in 1990 when wildfires burned nearby.

With the Grand Canyon closed to tourists in Arizona, GOP Gov. Fife Symington beseeched the White House to permit National Guard troops to open the gates and provide services.

“We have tourists in from all over the world. . . . The Grand Canyon was the centerpoint of their vacation, and they’re being turned away. That’s a horrible image for Arizona to be spread across the country,” said the governor’s spokesman, Doug Cole. The White House said the proposal was of dubious legality, but would study it.

The shutdown aside, Republicans decided to turn their attention to the landmark legislation to erase deficits by 2002.

The product of months of work, the bill would change the face of government, overhauling Medicare, transforming Medicaid into a program of grants to the states with few federal strings attached and cutting or eliminating dozens of programs.

Medicare premiums would rise and wealthy senior citizens would pay more than those of lower income under the proposal, which Republicans said was necessary to save the program and Democrats said was a GOP bid to plunder $270 billion over seven years to finance tax cuts for the rich.

On taxes, though, Republicans tried to blunt the Democratic charge. A $500-per-child tax credit would go to single parents earning up to $75,000 a year and couples earning up to $110,000, far less than the $200,000-per-household limit the House approved earlier in the year.

As an added sweetener, the final House-Senate compromise envisions a partial, $125-per-child tax cut for 1995 payable in October, 1996--a few weeks before elections.

House debate followed arguments that have echoed in Congress all year.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) ripped into the measure. “It asks too much, in my view, of people who are in the middle class and people who are trying to get into the middle class, people who are really struggling,” he said.

Republicans said the bill was vital to stop piling up a national debt of nearly $5 trillion.

“We know this is the right thing to do. We know it must be done now. We know you can’t run away from it,” House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas said shortly before the roll was called.