Congress Scraps Down To The Wire

WASHINGTON (AP, Nov. 14) -- A spent Congress fought its last, angry melees over U.N. dues and the 2000 census and adjourned for the year Thursday, capping a session that featured a bipartisan budget triumph and a trade setback for President Bill Clinton inflicted by his own party.

In a typically hectic final day at the Capitol, lawmakers sent Clinton the three remaining spending bills for 1998 and concluded battles over overseas abortions and aid to countries with faltering currencies.

At the end of a session that produced the budget-balancing bill, partisan warfare over campaign finance and last week's Democratic revolt against Clinton's trade initiative, legislators mostly seemed happy it was over.

"Everyone has too long been away from home," Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said, quoting former President Eisenhower's comment about the problems of Washington.

Signs of frayed nerves were everywhere. During debate on the census, Rep. Randy Cunningham, R-Calif., agreed to take back his words after telling a story about a poisonous snake that Democrats complained cast them as reptiles. And Democrats forced a roll-call vote on the routine motion to adjourn, in protest of the relentless GOP investigation of the California election in which Democratic Rep. Lorreta Sanchez nosed out her Republican rival, former Rep. Robert Dornan.

Six weeks after fiscal 1998 began, The House voted 282-110 to approve the last of the new year's 13 annual spending bills to provide $30 billion for the departments of State, Justice and Commerce. Senate passage by voice vote sent the measure to the president for his signature.

It became a battleground for Republicans' refusal to provide any of the $3.5 billion credit line Clinton wants for the International Monetary Fund, or the more than $900 million he wants for America's unpaid dues to the United Nations. The IMF is hoping to shore up flagging Asian currencies, while the United States has been using the United Nations to confront Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Those GOP cuts were the price exacted for Clinton's rejection of conservative demands for a ban on aid to groups that use their own money to perform abortions overseas or to lobby foreign governments for abortion-rights laws.

The standoff underlined the power of anti-abortion conservatives, who refused just days earlier to back Clinton's failed trade bill unless the White House accepted limits on aid for overseas abortion advocacy.

GOP leaders ignored pleas by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to provide the money to the international organizations. Both sides accused the other of acting irresponsibly.

In a letter to Clinton, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., urged him not to "give domestic political considerations higher priority than national security concerns."

In response, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., called the GOP move in eliminating the U.N. and IMF money "a negligent decision ... that significantly damages the United States. It does not punish Bill Clinton, it punishes the country."

A last-ditch effort by conservatives to strike a deal with the administration failed after it became clear that abortion-rights senators would kill the measure and Clinton would veto it. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston, R-La., said he would try to get the U.N. and IMF money in a spending bill next spring.

The same Commerce-Justice-State bill contained a contentious provision, negotiated between Clinton and Republican leaders, to let the Census Bureau prepare to use scientific sampling for the count of Americans in 2000. It would leave a final decision until early 1999, when the White House and lawmakers will fight it out anew.

The administration says sampling, which uses computers to estimate certain population segments, would help prevent expected undercounts of minorities. Republicans led by Gingrich worried that the technique can be abused to help boost counts of minority voters, who tend to vote Democratic.

Replaying the split between Clinton and many Democrats that surfaced during the recent trade bill fight, some Democrats -- particularly African-Americans and Hispanics -- said the compromise leaves Republicans with the upper hand to kill sampling.

That would decrease Democrats' chances of electoral success when new districts reflecting the census results are drawn in 2002. Among their objections was language by which Congress would finance a GOP court challenge to the constitutionality of sampling.

"I don't know why we would give standing to Newt Gingrich" to bring a lawsuit, said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., "and then pay for it."

Earlier in the day, Congress sent Clinton two other spending measures: a $13 billion foreign-aid bill and legislation providing $855 million in federal payments to the District of Columbia's local government.

The foreign aid bill provided $385 million in aid for overseas family planning efforts -- minus the restrictions conservatives wanted.

The District of Columbia spending bill passed after Republicans removed a plan to give $3,200 vouchers to about 2,000 families to help their children attend private schools.

In other business:

• By voice votes, the House and Senate approved legislation providing the ailing Amtrak passenger railroad with $3.4 billion for its operations and reducing some labor protections.
• The House approved by 396-2 a nonbinding measure calling for an international war crimes tribunal to try Saddam Hussein for human rights violations.
• The House sent Clinton a bill allowing the Treasury to mint new $1 coins and quarters commemorating each state.
• Lawmakers approved legislation letting thousands of illegal immigrants and hundreds of thousands of Central Americans remain in the country as they apply for permanent residency.
• By voice votes, Congress shipped Clinton a stopgap bill financing federal agencies through Nov. 26 that are covered by spending bills the president has not yet signed into law.

Copyright 1997   The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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