Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 19, 1995 TAG: 9505190104
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
By a near party-line vote of 238-193, lawmakers approved a plan they said would wring an unprecedented $1.4 trillion in savings from budgets over the next seven years.
Among Virginia's representatives, all Democrats voted against the budget and all Republicans voted for it.
Medicare and Medicaid would take the biggest hits and hundreds of programs would be eliminated, but the sting would be soothed for some by $350 billion worth of tax breaks for families, corporations and investors.
As a down payment, House Republicans later won passage of a bill paring $16.4 billion from previously enacted budgets. That bill to immediately cut $6 billion from housing programs, $2 billion from airport improvements, $1.5 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency and $875 million from school programs passed 235-189.
Down the hall, the Senate commenced a weeklong debate on its own $961 billion seven-year budget-balancing measure that for now lacked tax reductions. Passage there was certain, too. But for the moment, the focus was on the House, whose more conservative members have propelled the Republican drive to transform federal priorities.
President Clinton said the House plan ``fails to meet that test'' of a disciplined budget that reduces the deficit and reflects American values. ``It slashes Medicare to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, reduces crucial investments in education, and raises taxes on working people,'' Clinton said. ``There is a right way and wrong way. This is the wrong way.''
In the Senate, Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., planned to try embarrassing Democrats by forcing them to vote today on Clinton's budget. The president's plan left deficits at $200 billion indefinitely.
With the GOP commanding the House for the first time in 41 years and the Senate for the first time in nine, both fiscal outlines represented long-awaited chances for Republicans to demonstrate how they would reshape government. Their bills called for constricting its reach by eliminating hundreds of agencies and programs, from the Commerce Department to aid to Russia, and trimming benefits for the poor, farmers, veterans and college students.
As the final roll call was under way, a line of Republican lawmakers snaked up the steps to the speaker's desk so Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., could autograph copies of the budget that claimed it would lead to a surplus in 2002, the first since 1969.
by CNB