Senate OKs GOP Budget Plan--and Clinton’s the Target

Splitting along party lines, the Senate approved a new budget-balancing plan Thursday that Republicans hope will help define the differences between their candidate, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), and President Clinton, who vetoed a similar budget last year.

The plan calls for balancing the budget by 2002, giving middle-class families a $500-per-child tax credit and overhauling the welfare system and other pillars of the GOP agenda. All 53 Republicans voted for the measure. Forty-six Democrats voted against it.

Although the budget backs away from some of the most controversial aspects of Republican efforts last year to slow the growth of federal spending, senators predicted that its adoption will lay the groundwork for a repeat of last year’s partisan budget impasse.

“Both parties are trying to ride a dead horse,” said Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.), co-sponsor of a bipartisan budget alternative that was rejected on a surprisingly close vote of 53 to 46, with 22 Republicans and 24 Democrats, including Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, voting to approve. “It didn’t work then, and it isn’t going to work now,” Breaux said.

Republicans used the debate to try to score political points against Clinton--and not just on budget matters. Republicans offered, but then withdrew, an amendment denouncing Clinton for seeming to claim active-duty military status as one legal ground for seeking to postpone a sexual-harassment lawsuit.

Before approving the budget, the Senate adopted an amendment that would add $5 billion to the GOP budget for domestic programs--enough to keep spending for education, health and other social programs at roughly this year’s levels. That change may meet resistance from some Republicans in the more tightfisted House, which approved its version of the budget last week.

That and other differences between the two versions are to be ironed out in House-Senate negotiations in early June.

Both budgets call for cutting taxes by $122 billion over six years, down from the $245-billion tax cut the GOP sought last year and just barely enough to accommodate the $500-per-child tax cut. It calls for reining in the growth of federal spending by $158 billion in Medicare, $53 billion in welfare and $72 billion in Medicaid.

The budget is a broad resolution that sets targets for spending and revenues, but Congress later must enact detailed legislation to make the savings and tax cuts needed to meet those targets.

Last year, Republicans rolled those spending and tax measures into one bill. This year, the GOP plans to draft three separate bills: one to overhaul Medicaid and welfare; another to rein in the growth of Medicare and a third to cut taxes. But the House and Senate budgets call for very different strategies for enacting those bills.

The Senate, where Republicans are cool to the idea of cutting taxes, insisted that the tax-cut bill could not be considered unless Congress passes the other bills to rein in spending on Medicare, welfare and other entitlements. Members of both parties are predicting that those bills will be vetoed by Clinton.

Under the House budget, however, Congress could pass and send to Clinton a tax bill even if no spending restraints are approved.

The bipartisan budget alternative rejected by the Senate would have charted a middle course between the GOP budget and Clinton’s own plan, which also purports to eliminate the deficit by 2002. However, it included a controversial proposal to scale back the formula for cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other federal benefits.

The $5 billion added for domestic programs came on an amendment by a top Republican, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, and signaled a new GOP strategy this year of trying to avoid another protracted confrontation with the White House over annual appropriation bills needed to keep the government operating.

The Domenici amendment was designed to help the GOP satisfy Clinton’s priorities without making deep cuts in other areas of importance to the GOP, such as energy programs that are important to Domenici’s home state.

The final vote on the budget was delayed when Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) offered the amendment denouncing Clinton’s legal strategy in the sexual-harassment suit filed by Paula Corbin Jones.

Murkowski said that Clinton’s lawyer, in briefs filed last week, had claimed that as commander in chief, the president is entitled to the same immunity from civil suits afforded active-duty military personnel under the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act.

Clinton’s lawyer has argued that is a misreading of his legal argument.

Under pressure from colleagues who wanted to finish work on the budget and leave for a weeklong Memorial Day recess, Murkowski withdrew the amendment but promised to keep raising the issue in other legislation.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) denounced the effort as pure politics. “This is an effort to embarrass the president of the United States, and we all understand that.”