Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 15, 1995 TAG: 9502150076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
But the latest milestone in the House GOP's ``Contract with America'' agenda faces a far less certain future in the Senate. And Clinton, who has demanded that his police program remain untouched, has threatened to veto it if it reaches his desk.
``I'm not going to let them wreck our crime bill, which is putting 100,000 new cops on the street,'' Clinton said Tuesday in an interview with Huntington, W.Va., television station WSAZ-TV.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the Judiciary Committee he chairs will have to rewrite the House package to secure Senate passage and come up with a bill that Clinton will be compelled to sign.
The sixth and final bill in the crime package, passed by a 238-192 vote largely along party lines, replaces crime-prevention programs and a commitment to help put 100,000 new cops on the streets - two cornerstones of the 1994 anti-crime law - with a $10 billion block grant that local governments can use as they see fit to fight crime.
Overriding a presidential veto would require a two-thirds vote by each house.
``We are very much in the comfort zone,'' said White House spokesman Mike McCurry. ``If a bill comes here in the form the House has passed it, it will be veto bait.''
The vote was immediately criticized by police groups.
Passage gave the new Republican majority their fifth major legislative triumph less than halfway through the 100 days in which their ``Contract With America'' promised votes on a number of issues. The House GOP previously won passage of a balanced-budget amendment, a measure giving the president a line-item veto on spending bills, a bill to end unfunded mandates on state and local governments and a bill, already signed into law, making lawmakers abide by the same employment laws private employers must obey.
Elsewhere in Congress on Tuesday:
The Senate rejected a Democratic bid to exempt Social Security from a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said that in spite of the mostly-party-line 57-41 vote, ``For the moment, everybody is willing to protect Social Security.''
A House Ways and Means subcommittee drafted welfare-reform legislation giving states almost complete control over their troubled foster care programs. It rejected Democratic efforts to strengthen federal oversight of those programs and increase funding for homes for the growing numbers of abused and neglected children.
Republican and Democratic senators eager to end the baseball strike introduced legislation that would partially repeal professional baseball's antitrust exemption. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he does not support it because he doesn't want Congress involved in the labor-management dispute.
The crime package faces a precarious future. ``We can't do it in six parts'' because of Senate filibuster rules that could draw out debate indefinitely, Hatch said. ``We're going to have to come up with our own Senate bill,'' he said, predicting it would take at least a month before it emerges from his committee.
Senate Republican Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., said noncontroversial items in the package might be combined and separated from the measure concerning 100,000 new police. ``I'm not interested in trying to give the president a challenge to veto a bill. It's more important that we get major crime revision passed,'' he said.
White House chief of staff Leon Panetta said the administration believed it had enough votes to sustain a veto of a crime bill that gutted the cops-on-the-beat program. ``We would not be disappointed if that was one of the first vetoes we cast.''
Chris Sullivan of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers told a Justice Department news conference, ``We're angry about what happened and we urge the Senate to reject what the House chose today.''
Last year's anti-crime law was ``the toughest crime bill that ever passed this country,'' said Bob Scully of the National Association of Police Organizations. ``In one and a half months, the new majority in the House of Representatives has destroyed and gutted what took us six years to put together. The vote, he said, is a signal that the new Congress ``just doesn't care and doesn't want to listen to law enforcement.''
The block grant bill would give local governments $2 billion a year over the next five years for crime-fighting, replacing the $7.5 billion for community police and $3.9 billion for prevention programs that last year's law authorized for 1996-2000.
A chief architect of last year's bill, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., angrily dismissed the notion that prevention efforts - such as after-school programs and midnight basketball - were of little use in fighting crime.
``I'm so sick and tired of this pap,'' Biden said. ``Where is the logic of dismantling this crime bill other than to say it has the name Clinton on it so it must be bad?''
by CNB