Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9408300015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
It will take the same to resuscitate health reform, barely hanging on in the House and Senate.
Not that the political warfare on crime wasn't intense, particularly last week in the Senate, where the GOP senses a chance to capture control for the first time since 1986.
Republicans demanded a chance to cut social spending - dubbed pork - from the crime bill, and to toughen mandatory minimum sentencing provisions as well.
Democrats said it was all a National Rifle Association-backed ruse to strip out a ban on 19 assault-style weapons.
And even though six Republican senators helped save the bill for a Democratic president, each party saw the measure as a chance to gain the political high ground a scant 10 weeks before the mid-term elections.
Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, said earlier in the week that the public is ``not stupid.''
``They know that for 25 years Republicans have been trying to get tough laws on the books and build prisons, to grab violent criminals by the throat. And for 25 years, basically, Democrats have been coddling criminals,'' Gramm said.
Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, moments before a critical Senate vote Thursday, said whatever the outcome, ``it is going to demonstrate again to the voters that we need more Republicans elected in November.''
Not surprisingly, Democrats saw it differently.
Moments after prevailing on a key procedural vote, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine said the measure could be a political turning point. The bill is designed to help pay for 100,000 new police officers and build new prison cells. It also expands the federal death penalty and toughens sentencing guidelines.
``On crime, the time is over when in fact or perception the Republican Party is seen as the party tough on crime. It's the Democrats,'' Mitchell said.
Clinton - juggling foreign policy problems, bedeviled by Whitewater, and struggling to gain his way in Congress - was predictably bipartisan in victory.
``I want to salute the senators of both Republican and Democratic ranks who put law and order, safety and security, above politics and party,'' he said at the White House shortly after six Republicans joined 45 Democrats to overcome a determined GOP effort to open the crime bill to changes.
``I hope ... we can move on doing the people's business across party lines, unencumbered by the labels of the past and the false choices of the past, moving to a better future for all Americans,'' Clinton said.
Two weeks ago, the crime bill seemed all but lost in the House, trapped by an unlikely coalition of Republicans, Democratic foes of gun control and liberal foes of the death penalty.
After partisanship failed - Clinton couldn't whip enough Democrats into line - the White House opened talks with moderate Republicans. A tuck taken out of crime prevention money, a tinker on another provision or two, and 31 additional GOP votes materialized.
That sent the bill to the Senate, where Republicans, sensing a chance to sting Clinton and Democratic senatorial candidates, demanded a chance to cut more spending and tighten minimum sentencing provisions.
But after four days of maneuvering, three Republicans who had endorsed the GOP attempt to force a vote on changes decided to let the bill go as is, joining three other Republicans already satisfied with it.
Interestingly, two of the three, John Chafee of Rhode Island and John Danforth of Missouri, have been heavily involved in efforts to fashion a bipartisan compromise on health care, the issue that has dominated Congress all year.
And health reform's only hope - in the House as well as the Senate - is for a proposal that can cross party lines, holding the liberals who want to cover everyone, while attracting the moderates of both parties who favor less.
by CNB