GOP Allows Welfare for Some Legal Immigrants

Republican negotiators gave in to the White House on Friday in agreeing to restore welfare coverage for legal immigrants who become disabled, marking the first real sign of progress in negotiations on a final balanced-budget and tax-cut package.

With time running out before a scheduled August congressional recess next weekend, GOP and administration officials abruptly picked up the pace of their talks Friday.

“We’re making enormous tangible progress,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) said. “We’re getting closer every minute.”

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said the two sides will try to wind up their talks “in the next two or three days.”

Republicans also agreed to scrap a measure, opposed by the White House, that would have allowed states to reduce special supplemental payments to elderly individuals receiving disability benefits, and agreed to restore Medicaid benefits for about 30,000 children who would have lost coverage next year under the year-old welfare law.

Senior administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and Budget Director Franklin D. Raines, spent the day moving in and out of meetings in the Capitol with GOP and Democratic leaders in search of a compromise on a wide range of spending and tax issues.

Although substantial progress was made on spending issues, both sides agreed that differences over taxes remain much harder to bridge.

As one indication of the heightened seriousness of the talks, police blocked access by reporters to the hallway leading to a meeting room on the third floor of the Capitol where the tax issues were being hammered out, and as the day wore on, the size of the meetings was scaled back dramatically in an effort to minimize the rhetoric.

The dispute over welfare coverage for legal immigrants was among a dozen thorny issues separating the White House and congressional Republicans.

A budget accord struck by the two sides last spring called for restoring Supplemental Security Income for legal immigrants who were in the United States as of Aug. 22 or who become disabled in the future. Those benefits were wiped out by the 1996 welfare reform legislation, a move that both sides agreed was too harsh.

But although the Senate approved the changes as part of its balanced-budget plan, the House did not, triggering charges that Republicans had reneged on their agreement.

Friday, House GOP leaders finally backed down and agreed to go along with the Senate language, according to House and Senate GOP aides.