THE BUDGET STRUGGLE; CLINTON WINS APPROVAL OF HIS BUDGET PLAN AS GORE VOTES TO BREAK SENATE DEADLOCK - New York Times
With Vice President Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote, the Senate gave final Congressional approval tonight to President Clinton's five-year economic program.
This means that the budget plan, the most important legislative issue of the Clinton Presidency so far, cleared Congress by the narrowest possible margin and awaits only the President's signature before becoming law. Enactment of the legislation was viewed at the White House as essential to Mr. Clinton's ultimate success as President.
The outcome was in doubt until Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, the last Senator to announce which way he would vote, declared on the Senate floor at 8:30 P.M. that he would support Mr. Clinton. [ Roll-call, page 6. ] Clinton Thanks Backers
At the White House today, Mr. Clinton met for more than an hour with Senator Kerrey in the morning and spent much of the rest of the day on the telephone thanking Democrats who had voted for his plan in the House of Representatives.
Ads by Google
After the Senate vote, President Clinton emerged from the White House to greet cheering supporters who had gathered at the front steps.
"This was not easy, but real change is never easy," he told them. "After 12 long years, we can say to the American people tonight, We have laid a foundation for a renewal of the American dream." [ Excerpts from the President's remarks and the Senate debate, pages 7 and 8. ]
When the vote was announced on the Senate floor, about 75 Clinton aides who had gathered in the Roosevelt Room of the White House erupted in prolonged cheers, whoops and applause.
The staff members greeted Lloyd Bentsen, the Treasury Secretary, Leon E. Panetta, the budget director, and Roger C. Altman, the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, by chanting their names as if they were rock stars.
"Leon, Leon!," they shouted. "Roger, Roger!"
An identical version of the $496 billion deficit-cutting measure was approved Thursday night by the House, 218 to 216. The Senate was divided 50 to 50 before Mr. Gore voted. Since tie votes in the House mean defeat, the bill would have failed if even one representative or one senator who voted with the President had switched sides.
The official final vote in the 100-member Senate was an oddity, 51 to 50.
Wrapping up the debate with about half the senators in their seats, Senator Jim Sasser of Tennessee, chairman of the Budget Committee, called the President's plan "a watershed in American fiscal history."
George J. Mitchell of Maine, the Democratic leader, declared: "The American people want change. They voted for change last year. And tonight we're going to deliver change. President Clinton has given us a fair plan. I say it's fair to give him a chance."
But Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said the increased taxes in the program would devastate the economy. Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican leader, said the main flaw in the plan was that the tax increases would be retroactive to the first of this year, while most of the spending cuts would occur after the next election.
"This President will go down in history," Mr. Dole asserted, "as the only President who raised taxes before he took office and cut spending after he left office." Closest of Votes
Donald A. Ritchie, the associate Senate historian, said that over the decades very few votes on such a significant matter had been decided by such close margins. He mentioned two: the bid to convict Andrew Johnson on impeachment charges in 1868, which failed in the Senate by one vote, and the extension of the military draft in 1941 on the cusp of World War II, which passed in the House by one vote.
In the House Thursday, every Republican voted against the economic plan, and all Republican senators had announced their opposition before the Senate debate began. All but six Democratic Senators had announced that they would vote for it. Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party.
Mr. Kerrey, the swing vote, played Hamlet all day.
At 6 P.M., White House officials and Senate Democratic leaders said that they believed Mr. Kerrey was on their side but admitted that they did not know for sure. At 7:55, his fellow Nebraskan, Senator J. James Exon, indicated to the Senate in a speech that he did not know how Mr. Kerrey would vote.
When Mr. Kerrey announced his position to the Senate, he said he did not trust the Republicans to improve the economy if he decided to vote with them to kill Mr. Clinton's plan. Addressing the President, he declared, "I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down your Presidency."
Mr. Kerrey had called the President at the White House only moments earlier to inform him of his decision. After their meeting this morning, Mr. Clinton called Mr. Kerrey in the Senate cloakroom to urge him once again to support the plan.
"Obviously, the President's very happy about Senator Kerrey's vote," Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary, said tonight after the announcement. Partisan to Core
On the surface, the debate in the Senate turned on the question of what effect the economic plan would have on the economy. But almost every speech had a partisan tone. And the central underlying issue, simply put, was political victory or defeat -- whether President Clinton would win his first big fight with Congress or whether, six months into his term, he would be another President faced with failure.
Phil Gramm of Texas, who may run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1996, declared: "I believe this program is going to make the economy weak. I believe hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. I believe Bill Clinton will be one of those people."
But Democrats said Mr. Clinton deserved credit for trying to clean up a fiscal mess created by his Republican predecessors. "Supply-side theories just flat didn't work," said John Glenn of Ohio.
And Bill Bradley of New Jersey spoke of the "pattern of irresponsibility of the last 10 years" in which a deficit was run up that "like acid, eats away at our future prospects."
Americans demanded change, Mr. Bradley said, and that was what "swept Bill Clinton into the White House and brought this plan before us today."
Most of the senators who spoke in favor of the legislation said they were opposed to parts of it. But they said the alternative -- to pass nothing -- was much worse.
Senator Kerrey was perhaps the most critical of plan among those who voted for it. "My heart aches with the conclusion that I will vote 'yes' for a bill which challenges Americans too little," he said. Technical Debate
What happened in the Senate for most of the day and into the evening was a debate only in the technical sense. Mostly, senators stood one after another and delivered long speeches with hardly any other senators around. Many of them used four-color charts and pointers to illustrate their points. This is what the Greatest Deliberative Body in the World has become in the television era.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the top Senator on tax issues, delivered a rambling, extemporaneous speech to an empty chamber this morning on the fall of the Soviet Union and on the economic theories of Prof. William J. Baumol of New York University and several other topics that popped into his mind.
If there was a topic sentence, it was probably this: "We don't want the kind of disarray that settled on our cold war opponent to settle on us."
Unlike the House members, many of whom were on the fence when the debate began, all senators but Mr. Kerrey had announced how they would vote before today. It is safe to say that no one's position was changed by any one else's speech. Speaker Sees Risks
The pace was quite a contrast with that at the end of the debate in the House on Thursday, when the vote went down to the wire after impassioned speeches by Congressional leaders.
Today, House Democratic leaders seemed like someone the day after successful surgery: sore and a bit bloody but enormously relieved that it was over and that the outcome had been positive.
Thomas S. Foley of Washington, the Speaker of the House, told reporters at lunch that he was enormously proud of his troops and that he resented the notion that lawmakers were afraid to take political risks for the good of the country.
"A lot of raw guts were shown there from time to time by people who were willing to lay down their offices," he said.
Mr. Foley promised that further deficit-reduction measures would be forthcoming, and he said they would not involve higher taxes. "This has to be the first step in a series of hard things we have to do in the next few years," he said.
Among White House strategists, the view was that the next step was to convince the public that the plan was a wise one. "Do you think Bob Dole is going to stop talking about the President's package after tonight as tax and spend?" a Presidential assistant said. "We cannot allow the people who opposed this plan to define it."
Because the decisions of House-Senate conference committees cannot be amended and because budget rules do not allow filibusters, the Republicans who opposed the measure were relegated to offering points of order against various provisions of the legislation in order to force votes.
One of those challenged the constitutionality of making the bill's income tax increases for affluent taxpayers retroactive to Jan. 1 on the ground that it violated the "due process" clause of the Constitution.
In fact, most tax measures include retroactive provisions, and the Supreme Court settled the matter long ago. But the point of order allowed Republicans to force a vote on one of the most unpopular aspects of the Democratic program.
"To retroactively impose taxes on the living and the dead back to Jan. 1, 1993, is the height of unfairness," said John McCain of Arizona. "It establishes a precedent that ought to frighten every American."
The point of order was rejected, 56 to 44, on nearly a straight party-line vote. Tax Rate Up
The bill would raise the top income tax rate, now 31 percent, to 36 percent for single taxpayers on taxable incomes from $115,000 to $250,000 and for couples with taxable incomes from $140,000 to $250,000. Incomes above $250,000 would be subject to a 39.6 percent rate.
Taxable income is the remainder after deductions and personal exemptions are subtracted from adjusted gross income. A taxable income of $140,000 normally means a total income of about $180,000, and a taxable income of $250,000 implies a total income of over $300,000.
The Administration calculates that only the top 1 percent of taxpayers would be affected by higher rates.
Other tax provisions include these:
*A 4.3-cent increase in the 14.1-cent-a-gallon Federal tax on gasoline.
*An increase to 35 percent from 34 percent in the corporate income tax rate.
*An expansion of the earned-income tax credit, which provides tax reductions, and in some instances rebates, for low-income workers.
*An increase to 85 percent from 50 percent in the amount of Social Security benefits subject to income taxes for upper-income and some middle-income retirees.
*A reduction to 50 percent from 80 percent in the portion of business meals and entertainment that can be deducted.
*Denial of deductions for club dues.
*New tax breaks for small businesses and real estate investors. Capping Entitlements
Projected spending would be reduced by more than $250 billion over the next five years, mainly by cutting military spending and putting limits on how much Medicare spending can rise.
Entitlement programs -- those like Social Security that pay benefits to everyone who meets certain eligibility requirements -- could be expanded only if other entitlements were cut or taxes were raised to offset the additional cost.
Programs that are subject to annual appropriations -- all those that are not entitlements -- would be subject to an overall freeze, and if spending is increased for one program, it will have to be cut for another.
