Clinton Urges Congress to Join Anti-Tobacco Battle

Armed with documents showing R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. tried to lure 13- and 14-year-old smokers, President Clinton told the Republican-led Congress on Saturday that he will “sit down with them any time, anywhere” to work out tough anti-tobacco legislation.

“This is not about politics. This is not about money. It is about our children,” the president said in his weekly radio address. “The 1998 Congress should be remembered as the Congress that passed comprehensive tobacco legislation, not the Congress that passed up this historic opportunity to protect our children and our future.”

He said he wants strong bipartisan legislation to cut teen smoking and financially penalize tobacco companies that don’t comply; to give the Food and Drug Administration full authority to regulate tobacco products as a drug; to protect tobacco farmers from devastating income loss; and to expand medical research, smoking-cessation programs and efforts cutting secondhand smoke.

“If Congress sends me a bill that mandates those steps, I will sign it,” Clinton said. “Our administration will sit down with them any time, anywhere to work out bipartisan legislation.”

His address came two days after the release on Capitol Hill of secret memos showing that R.J. Reynolds, the nation’s second-largest cigarette producer and marketer, developed and sustained, beginning in the 1970s, a direct advertising appeal to young smokers--as young as 13--that resulted in the hip Joe Camel campaign and even a special brand aimed at boys.

The president’s broadcast was taped Friday in advance of his Saturday morning deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit.

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In the Republican counterpart to Clinton’s address, Rep. Jerry Weller of Illinois renewed the GOP effort to throw out the so-called marriage penalty on income taxes and asked Clinton to endorse the proposal in his upcoming State of the Union address.

Weller said working couples pay $1,400 more a year on average than they would if they were allowed to file as single people.

“Since 1969, our tax laws have punished married couples when both spouses work,” Weller said, who is co-sponsoring a bill with Rep. David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.), to eliminate the provision.