Clinton Vetoes Bill After GOP Kills Budget Deal

President Clinton vetoed a spending bill late Monday, hours after House Republican leaders scuttled a tentative, bipartisan agreement on education funding that held brief promise of breaking the year-end budget stalemate.

Clinton’s exercise of the ultimate White House legislative power, on a bill that funded several core government agencies and allowed a pay raise for Congress, came as top Republican lawmakers were attacking efforts to advance sweeping new workplace safety regulations.

The developments further heightened the stakes in a budget battle between the Republican Congress and Clinton that is unfolding just a week before the national election. In play are billions of dollars in new school funding, measures to repeal a telephone excise tax and to cut other taxes, a proposal to raise the minimum wage, an effort to ease immigration laws and other important matters.

The controversial workplace regulations that drew renewed attention Monday are viewed by labor unions and the Clinton administration as essential to protect as many as 300,000 workers a year from repetitive-motion injuries such as typing, reaching and lifting. But business leaders and Republicans call the proposed rules an expensive and unneeded federal mandate.

The increasingly intense year-end confrontation is forcing many federal agencies to run only on daily stopgap spending bills, known as continuing resolutions. To avoid a government shutdown, Congress passed the 10th such resolution Monday. One month into a new fiscal year, several critical spending bills for 2001 remain unresolved.

The budget dispute now conceivably could last through election day. That would inject a wild card into close campaigns for control of the House, Senate and White House and, potentially, leave crucial decisions about the nation’s business in the hands of a lame-duck Congress.

Post-election congressional sessions are not without precedent. The House met in December 1998, for example, to impeach Clinton.

But Capitol Hill historians say the modern Congress has never met in October--and now, in all likelihood, in November--so close to an upcoming federal election. The previous record for preelection brinkmanship was set by an adjournment on Oct. 28, 1990.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), the soft-spoken successor to the fiery Newt Gingrich, seemed to take the delay in stride, even though his mantra for nearly two years has been to “make the trains run on time.”

“I’m not real happy that we’re here this late,” Hastert told reporters, “but you know, we’re not going to be pushed out of town with a bad deal.”

Clinton, for his part, continued to pressure congressional Republicans in an effort to win final, significant legislative victories before he leaves office.

The bill Clinton vetoed would have funded the Treasury Department, the White House, Congress and other core government agencies. It includes a repeal of a 102-year-old tax on telephone service, now 3%, and a provision that would pave the way for a congressional pay raise of $3,800 to $145,100 a year. The White House announced the veto just before midnight EST.

“The Congress’ continued refusal to focus on the priorities of the American people leaves me no alternative but to veto this bill,” Clinton said in a statement. “I cannot in good conscience sign a bill that funds the operations of the Congress and the White House before funding our classrooms, fixing our schools and protecting our workers.”

The developments capped a seesaw day at the Capitol that began with Republican and Democratic negotiators seeming to strike a deal on funding for a bill containing more than $100 billion in discretionary funding for education, health, labor and other programs. That legislation, the largest nondefense domestic spending bill, is key to any exit strategy.

The proposed deal for the first time would have set aside a federal outlay of at least $1 billion to repair crumbling schools. Republicans won a concession that another $300 million could be spent on education programs for the disabled or other needs.

Significantly, Democrats had dropped a demand to include funding or a tax credit for new school construction in the spending bill--moving that issue instead to a tax bill that has a clouded future.

But House Republican leaders balked at language in the tentative compromise that would have allowed the workplace safety regulations to move forward before Clinton leaves office, even though a final decision to implement them would have been left to his successor. Both the House and the Senate earlier this year passed legislation on mainly party-line votes to block the ergonomics rules.

“It’s very, very frustrating, very disheartening,” said Jack Lew, a top White House negotiator, who thought he had clinched agreement with Republican negotiators at 1:30 a.m. EST Monday only to see the accord fall apart 12 hours later. “I don’t know where you go from here.”

On immigration, another critical year-end issue, administration officials took a major step toward compromise as they dropped their insistence on one proposal that would allow permanent U.S. residence for at least 500,000 immigrants who entered the United States illegally before 1986.

Instead, John Podesta, the White House chief of staff, signaled in a letter to a key Republican senator that Clinton would consider other ideas to help immigrants who have been living for many years in the country in legal limbo.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) has proposed helping some people in that class by granting them “due process” to pursue green cards under a previous 1986 reform. The White House says Hatch’s measure does not go far enough.

But debate is focusing on whether Congress will boost immigration rights for what advocates estimate are hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans and Haitians who fled their countries during the late 1980s and early 1990s in a period of regional upheaval.

Republican leaders say those would-be immigrants--many, perhaps most, of whom came to the United States illegally--should not be moved to the head of a line of more than 3 million immigration applicants.

But Democrats, and some centrist Republicans, note that Congress cut special deals in 1997 and 1998 to allow Nicaraguans and Cubans favorable immigration terms. They complain that Republican leaders appear sympathetic to refugees of left-wing authoritarian regimes but not to those who flee oppressive right-wing regimes.

“It is long past time to close the chapter on this country’s history of choosing some people for preferential treatment,” Podesta said in his letter to Hatch.

The issue is crucial to many people in California, Florida and other states with high numbers of Central American and Caribbean immigrants. Southern California is home to many Salvadorans and Guatemalans who would be affected.