ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 26, 1996 TAG: 9604270019
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
TYPE: ANALYSIS
SOURCE: DAVID E. ROSENBAUM THE NEW YORK TIMES
THE SPENDING BILL for this fiscal year, soon to end, is finally passed. On the big questions, Republicans' and Democrats' campaigns have barely started.
In many respects, the battle over this year's budget ended with a whimper.
The House approved the $160 billion package by a resounding 399-25 vote, and the Senate did likewise later Thursday, 88-11, sending it to President Clinton for his signature.
The bill funds the federal government through the rest of fiscal 1996, which ends Sept.30.
All Virginia congressmen and both senators voted for it.
The agreement between President Clinton and the Republican Congress involves only one-tenth of the $1.6 trillion federal budget and will remain in effect only for the next five months.
It does not deal at all with the giant benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and welfare that consume about two-thirds of all federal spending. Nor does it make any changes in tax policy.
Even more important, the agreement does nothing to settle the fundamental disagreements about the ultimate size of the federal government and about whether 30 years of government social policy should be undone.
But as a political matter, the agreement provides a framework for this fall's election campaign. The voters in November will have a big voice in deciding the unresolved budget issues that have dominated Washington politics for the last two years.
The president and the Democratic minority in Congress can now use the budget deal to underscore their determination to preserve the environment and expand popular government programs in public education and law enforcement. Republicans can offer it as an illustration of the importance they place on restraining government spending and shifting the money saved toward the military.
Where the president made concessions, they were in less spending, often much less, for programs in areas such as the arts, population control and mass transit. The pinch will be felt, no doubt. But if Democrats should regain control of Congress, this money could be restored without lasting damage.
At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Clinton remarked that he would have happily accepted this budget last fall. Whether or not that is so, opinion polls show that the public mostly blames Republicans for the budget impasse that caused the government to shut down twice. The president clearly wants to reinforce that blame.
Still, Robert Reischauer, probably the foremost nonpartisan authority on the federal budget, thinks that whatever political battles the president won, ``historians will judge that the Republicans won the war.''
Reischauer, who directed the Congressional Budget Office for eight years when Democrats controlled Congress and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he believed this for three reasons:
The overall level of spending in the programs addressed by the agreement is close to what the Republicans sought all along, $23 billion less than last year.
Military spending is $7 billion more than Clinton wanted.
Deep cuts, 10 percent and more, are made in many programs to which Republicans assign relatively low priority, such as low-income energy assistance, legal services and college scholarships for the poor, and grants to states for foster care.
Moreover, the Republicans forced the president to deal with the budget on their terms. As last year wore on, the issue became not whether it should be balanced but when and how. The president offered his own plan to balance the budget in seven years.
But rather than accept that as the major political victory it surely was, the Republicans overplayed their hand and refused to budge on their proposals to reverse the course of public policy in ways that were, in Reischauer's words, ``unachievable in a nation of incrementalists.''
That was what led to the government shutdowns and to the public perception, right or wrong, that the Republicans had lost control of the legislative process - all of which played into Clinton's hand politically.
Now Republicans in Congress seem to have learned that they can claim political victory without having annihilated the opposition, and they did so Thursday, one after another.
With the writing of this year's budget finally out of the way, the politicians must now turn to the budget for the 1997 fiscal year, which begins Oct.1.
They are already months behind schedule.
Addressing the agreement on this year's budget, Rep. Gerald Solomon, R-N.Y., said Thursday: ``Let us be under no illusions that this is the end of this effort. We have a long way to go in the coming fiscal years.''
A long way indeed. It is safe to bet that little progress will be made on the 1997 budget - to say nothing of a seven-year balanced-budget agreement - until after the November elections.
Clinton's biggest success may have been in preventing Republican changes whose consequences would have been irreversible: to allow more logging in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from restraining development in wetlands, to stop the adding of plants and animals to the endangered species list, to discharge members of the military infected with the AIDS virus, to abolish the Commerce Department.
Once felled, centuries-old trees in Alaska could hardly have been brought back to life; once dismantled, all the king's horses and all the king's men could not have put the Commerce Department back together again.
Where the president made concessions, they were in less spending, often much less, for programs in areas like the arts, population control and mass transit. The pinch will be felt, no doubt. But if Democrats should regain control of Congress, this money could be restored without lasting damage.
``The facts speak for themselves,'' said Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Budget Committee. ``It is a clear victory for Republicans.''
Clinton offered his plan last month. Republicans in Congress say they will put forth their budget next week, with less spending and lower taxes than the president's.
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