Dole Targets Public Housing in His Potshots at Clinton

Calling public housing one of the world’s “last bastions of socialism,” presumptive Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole vowed Monday to significantly downsize the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But the Senate majority leader also acknowledged that HUD’s goals are “commendable” and said that a Dole administration would enforce fair housing laws.

“There is no room for discrimination,” Dole told a convention of Realtors here.

Public housing was just one of several topics on which Dole took issue with the Clinton administration on Monday as he pursued his strategy of using public appearances and the Senate forum to draw policy contrasts between himself and the president.

In separate speeches on the Senate floor, the Kansan pressed his ongoing attacks on “liberal leniency in Clinton courts” and characterized Clinton’s trade policy with Japan as “a spectacular failure, a fiasco.”

Curiously, however, Dole left to other congressional Republicans the job of responding to Clinton’s major initiative of the day--the enunciation of a new drug-fighting initiative.

It was Dole’s attacks on housing policy that elicited the sharpest administration response.

Dole said that rather than maintain low-income housing projects, the government should issue vouchers, which “would enable poor Americans to choose where they like to live--just like we do.”

HUD Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, reacting to Dole’s comments, said that vouchers were precisely what the administration proposed only a year ago, but Congress failed to act.

“I don’t know where Sen. Dole was while members of his own party gutted the administration’s voucher proposals,” Cisneros said.

Dole, in his speech, attacked HUD as a “Big Brother” agency that has sought to intimidate “those doing nothing more than expressing their 1st Amendment rights.” He singled out three fair-housing investigations launched by then-Assistant Housing Secretary Roberta Achtenberg, including a 1994 action against a Berkeley, Calif., neighborhood group protesting the opening of a nearby home for recovering drug addicts.

Achtenberg resigned her post last year to make an unsuccessful bid for San Francisco mayor; she now serves as a senior aide to Cisneros.

In his floor remarks on the judiciary, Dole singled out for criticism a federal judge, Carl Muecke of Arizona, who was appointed 30 years ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Dole said Muecke had become “the de facto administrator” of Arizona’s prison system and epitomizes “a textbook example of judicial activism run amok.”

Dole chided Drew S. Days III, the U.S. solicitor general appointed by Clinton, for siding with Muecke in a friend-of-the-court brief after Arizona Atty. Gen. Grant Woods challenged Muecke’s “misguided rulings” giving inmates greater library and telephone privileges.