Legislative Train Wreck Awaits Congress

When Congress returns from a two-week recess Monday, Republicans will experience the political equivalent of the morning after. In the wreckage of budget talks with the White House that have all but collapsed, they face another sobering fiscal deadline and a legislative agenda in disarray.

Leaders of the Republican majority must make tough decisions about what to do at the end of next week when spending authority for much of the government expires--and what to do over the rest of the year if they come out of the budget talks empty-handed.

Republican leaders generally agree that they will not take the political risk of another partial government shutdown when stopgap appropriations expire for many federal agencies next Saturday. But they have not firmly decided exactly how to avoid it.

House Republicans seem to be having second thoughts about a strategy their leaders had been touting in recent weeks--”targeted” appropriations that provide full-year funding only for selected programs that the GOP likes. Many Senate Republicans oppose that approach, as do some rank-and-file House Republicans.

Instead, Republican leaders are preparing a measure to keep the government funded for 30 days--but with some programs singled out for elimination, according to Barry Jackson, chief of staff of the House Republican Conference. “It looks like we’re moving away from the targeted appropriations approach,” said another senior House GOP aide.

If they can get the government funding question settled by week’s end, GOP leaders are planning to adjourn Congress until late February--enough time to allow Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and other Republican presidential hopefuls to campaign for important early primaries and to allow members of Congress to cover their own political bases back home.

When budget talks between the White House and congressional leaders broke off Wednesday, Republicans suggested that they would be available to resume negotiations Sunday night, but only if President Clinton offered concessions that gave them reason to meet. White House officials said staff-level contacts continued, but there were no signs that a renewal of talks was in the offing.

During a fund-raising appearance Friday in Memphis, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) gave his grimmest assessment yet of the outlook for the talks. “I truly believe there will not be an agreement on the budget,” he said.

Republican leaders are expected to meet Monday to make final decisions on how to handle the government funding question. Although Jackson said House GOP leaders were leaning toward a one-month extension of government funding, Senate Republicans have been discussing a longer extension. A central question is whether a measure can be devised that squeezes the budget enough to satisfy House conservatives and still be acceptable to Clinton.

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The Republicans’ next step may be shaped, in part, by the tone set by the president in his State of the Union address Tuesday. If he sets a partisan, confrontational tone when he addresses the nation on prime-time television, GOP sources said, Republicans may respond in kind.

“A lot of what we do on Wednesday and Thursday depends on the mode and mood of the president: Is he conciliatory or is he going to be in-your-face?” said a senior GOP aide. Early indications at the White House are that the speech will be a little bit of both.

Democrats will devise tactics of their own for trying to turn up the heat on Republicans.

Senate Democratic leaders sent a letter to Dole on Friday urging him to break with the more confrontational House GOP and try to develop a budget compromise. They also released results of an analysis that purported to show that the concessions Republicans made in negotiations with the White House so far would throw the budget $22 billion out of balance in 2003 unless they made concessions on their tax-cut proposals.

Republicans disputed the analysis, saying it did not take account of tax-cut concessions they had made at the bargaining table.

Republican leaders also will confront the question of how to shape the year’s legislative agenda in light of the expected collapse of the budget talks. Because so much of the Republican wish list was in that single, monumental piece of budget legislation--welfare reform, tax cuts, Medicare overhaul and the whole overarching theme of eliminating the deficit--they risk coming up empty-handed if no budget compromise is reached.

The specter of a lost agenda prompted Gingrich on Friday to call Clinton a “do-nothing president.”

“The sad fact is we have a do-nothing, liberal president who is not interested in passing the reforms the country wants,” Gingrich said in North Carolina as he wrapped up a nine-day fund-raising tour. “The legislative branch got the job done.”

Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said in a recent speech that GOP leaders would begin to fill out their legislative calendar by finishing work on telecommunications legislation, product liability, the line-item veto and a new version of the defense authorization bill that Clinton vetoed.