New York Times
CONGRESS (MONICA) HAS MONTH (MONICA) TO SET SPENDING (MONICA)
Katharine Q. Seelye
With only five weeks left on the legislative calendar, Capitol Hill is girding for a chaotic if unproductive end-of-session dominated by Monica Lewinsky.
Congress has until Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year, to pass 13 spending bills to keep the Government running. Major issues that the Senate, whose members started trickling back into Washington today, and the House, which does not reconvene until after Labor Day, must resolve with President Clinton, who left today for Russia, include: whether to replenish the reserves of the International Monetary Fund, how to count citizens for the census in 2000 and how to find money in a balanced budget to pay for emergencies, like better security at United States embassies in light of the recent bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
A report on the President's conduct from Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, is expected to arrive on Capitol Hill sometime in September -- and then engulf Congress. This is expected to make the task of legislating, already difficult for this half of the 105th Congress, even more unlikely. Given up for dead some time ago were big-ticket items concerning health care, tobacco and campaign financing.
"This Congress will be known as the Monica Lewinsky scandal Congress," said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution, referring to the White House intern with whom Mr. Clinton has admitted having had an inappropriate relationship. "The prospects were never bright anyway for anything but the must-pass money bills. Now, I don't see anything else emerging."
Just today, at his opening news conference for the final legislative lap, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, delivered a stinging rebuke of the President, saying Mr. Clinton had behaved in a "disgusting" manner, set a "tragic example" for young people and forfeited his credibility.
"As a husband and a father," Mr. Lott said, "I am offended by the President's behavior. There is a moral dimension to the American Presidency, and today that dimension, that power, has been lost in scandal and in deception."
Mr. Lott said he was volunteering his views on the President's situation because it was making voters nervous and drowning out discussion of matters that Congress must resolve before it adjourns.
As lawmakers approach the homestretch, both parties appear to be on a pragmatic course. The Republicans, brimming with optimism, want to wrap up the spending bills to keep the spotlight on the President's woes. The Democrats, who generally support the President's posture on the bills, are afraid of being pulled down by his personal problems and for that reason want to wrap up the session quickly and go home.
Mr. Mann predicted that Mr. Clinton would stick to his veto threats, exercising his institutional authority even if he lacked personal authority. "He'll have to veto those bills where the Democrats are united behind him, and the Republicans understand that," Mr. Mann said. "The politics of this argues for the Republicans to make the closing weeks as legislatively uneventful as possible to keep the public focused on the Starr report."
Still, Republicans are preparing to take advantage of the President's apparently weakened condition to push through some of their pet projects. Senator Lott plans to bring up a bill this week to limit the ability of consumers to file for bankruptcy. The measure is favored by the credit-card industry and banks. He also plans to bring up a bill to build a Star Wars missile-defense system immediately. That measure is favored by conservatives.
A tax cut eagerly sought by Republicans is also in the balance. House conservatives, who are perceived by all sides as the biggest hurdle to an amicable resolution of the spending bills, are sending signals that if the leaders in both houses and the White House agree to a tax cut of more than $100 billion over five years, the conservatives could compromise more easily on other matters.
"If people say we'll have a tax cut," said Representative David M. McIntosh, Republican of Indiana and a leader of a band of conservative House members, "you'll see us be much more cooperative on other issues."
They have attached social issues to various spending bills, promoting their views against abortion, homosexual rights, family planning and environmental controls. But these are unlikely to pass the Senate and are not expected to snag the final negotiations.
One Republican aide said, "We're not standing on the Capitol dome with a bloody shirt saying, 'Shut down the Government!' "
Nevertheless, each side is publicly laying the groundwork to blame the other should the Government grind to a halt. Mr. Lott suggested today that voters were aware of the President's vulnerabilities and would not be fooled this year, as he says they were in 1995, into blaming Republicans for a shutdown.
But Democrats say that Republicans are so eager to make the President look bad that they do not want to pass substantive legislation, and that this will only throw sand in the legislative machinery.
"If there is a danger of a shutdown," Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, warned on the Senate floor, "we all know where it originates."
So far, the two houses have not sent a single appropriations bill to the White House, although on Tuesday the Senate is set to finalize and send to the President a military construction bill that has not been contentious. It expects to take up the foreign operations bill afterward.
The Administration has already threatened to veto 7 of the 13 bills, although such threats are routine at this stage of the typically drawn-out negotiation process that consumes Congress every year over spending. The President himself has vowed to veto only one bill, the one financing the departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services. He objects to the Republicans' proposed cuts in money for home heating fuel for low-income families, summer jobs for disadvantaged youths and various education initiatives.
Even as the Administration is seeking to portray itself as fully engaged on the spending bills, the President's previously announced agenda -- on child care, new school construction and hiring 100,000 new teachers -- lies dormant. The President's proposed budget relied on revenue from a tobacco bill that never materialized, and he has not proposed other ways to pay for his initiatives.
Administration officials insist that the continuing disclosures about the President's personal life have not altered their stance on the bills.
"We've put a very clear set of concerns out there," said Jack Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget, which tracks the spending bills for the President. "And we're sticking to them."