
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, June 26, 1993                   TAG: 9306260176
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CLINTON PLAN SQUEAKS BY

Hours after his budget package took a pre-dawn white-water trip through the Senate and survived, mostly intact, President Clinton said Friday that he saw "quite encouraging" prospects that the House and Senate would meld their separate versions of the plan into one mutually acceptable bill.

But outside the White House the signs that Clinton's budget faces yet another perilous legislative struggle were already mounting.

In their vote early Friday morning, the Senate Democratic majority had needed the help of Vice President Al Gore to move the budget past a united front of Republican opponents plus six Democrats by a vote of 50-49.

The clearest indicator of future trouble came hours later from Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma, a conservative Democrat whose attacks very nearly derailed the plan two weeks ago in the Senate Finance Committee.

Boren, who voted for the Senate package, warned Friday that he would vote against any budget compromise that does not have more spending cuts than tax increases and does not meaningfully restrain spending on federal benefits programs.

In the House, Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said he believed the House would not approve any compromise that did not raise spending for social programs well beyond the levels in the Senate bill. Clinton faces a formidable obstacle in Rangel, a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, which wrote the House version of the budget, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, whose members now hold the balance of votes to approve or reject a compromise.

The two leaders released the first of what will no doubt be a flotilla of trial balloons leading to the budget conference, each suggesting that Clinton's budget is doomed to defeat if certain concessions, liberal or conservative, are not granted.

None of that would matter if the first Democratic president in 12 years had a cushion of Democratic support for his budget, which aims to reduce the growth of the federal deficit by $500 billion over five years. But he does not.

In the Senate's 3 a.m. vote, six of the 56 Democrats, most of them conservatives, voted against the package, and one supporter, Patty Murray of Washington, was absent.

Lawmakers from both chambers will start meeting after the Fourth of July holiday to try to find a compromise that can pass muster in both the House and Senate. That will be especially difficult because the swing votes that control the fate of the budget lie at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum: conservatives in the Senate; liberals in the House.

by CNB