He Got What He Wanted

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Reagan wins his budget; the revolution begins

The debate in the House of Representatives was the angriest in ages. Democratic Leader Jim Wright of Texas shook the rafters with an accusation that the Reagan Administration wanted Congress to "lie down submissively" and let it "dictate every last scintilla" of the 1982 budget. Republican Leader Robert Michel blasted back that the only amendments the majority Democrats wanted to let his party offer to the budget bill were "bastards of the worst order for which we disown any parental responsibility." The vote, on a key procedural test, was suspensefully close: 217 to 210, with 29 Democrats breaking party ranks to give Ronald Reagan a narrow victory.*

The issue was important enough to make the passion understandable. The test vote broke the last Democratic attempt to modify Reagan's proposals for drastic cutbacks in federal spending for the poor and disadvantaged. By week's end, both the House and Senate had passed formal budget bills giving the President just about everything he wanted. Minor differences would have to be straightened out by a conference committee, but Step 1 of the Reagan revolution in Government economic and social policy was just about accomplished.

Equally important, in the furious view of the losing Democrats, Reagan had taken a serious stride toward that old congressional bugaboo, the "Imperial Presidency." Reagan raised that fear by getting the House to substitute budget proposals drafted by Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman for those worked out by its own committees. Said House Speaker Tip O'Neill after the vote: "I've never seen anything like this. Does this mean that any time the President is interested in a piece of legislation, he merely sends it over?" Last week at least, the answer seemed to be yes.

The showdown had been building for nearly two months, ever since the House and Senate passed their first budget resolutions in early May. Those measures provided for cuts in nonmilitary spending next fiscal year just as deep as Reagan wanted--$36.6 billion in the case of the House bill--but left it up to the legislative committees of both chambers to decide exactly which programs were to be reduced how much. In the Republican-controlled Senate, the committees went along with Reagan's wishes from the first.

But House committees, under Democratic leadership, voted reductions in a range of social programs--food stamps, child nutrition, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education--that did not go as deep as Reagan wanted. In O'Neill's words, the Democrats "cut them off at the knee instead of cutting them off at the hip." The Democrats substituted reductions in other programs--Export-Import Bank loans, for example.

When the committee proposals were combined into a single bill, it called for fiscal 1982 spending reductions of $37.8 billion, a bit more than Reagan wanted. In distributing those cuts, the measure gave the President about 85% of what he asked for. Nonetheless, Reagan and his aides decided to press for the full 100%.

The reasoning was partly economic: Administration officials feared that if Congress made only those changes that the Democrats proposed in the regulations governing who is entitled to receive federal benefits, social spending over the next three fiscal years would soar beyond any ability of the government to afford it. The reasoning was also partly ideological: Reagan and his lieutenants believe that unchecked social-spending programs place an unacceptable inflationary burden on the economy. And finally, the reasoning was political: in the White House view, the President could never achieve his sweeping changes in policy unless he got them enacted all at once, before his popularity began to ebb.

Accordingly, Stockman carried a document to key House Democrats detailing changes Reagan sought in the budget bill, and the President phoned O'Neill to ask that those changes be submitted to a floor vote. O'Neill later told the House that when he pressed Reagan on which changes he considered most important, the President gave only vague answers. O'Neill left unspoken--but obvious--the implication that Reagan was asking the House to enact a document he himself had not bothered to read.

With a sense of personal insult idded to their deep concern for inflicting injury on major American social programs, the House Democratic leaders cleverly maneuvered the fight onto narrow procedural ground. As an alternative to the bill shaped by the House committee, Republicans wanted to present a single, sweeping measure for an either-or vote. But the Democratic-controlled House Rules Committee resolved to force the Republicans instead to submit six separate amendments slashing appropriations $5.2 billion more than the Democrats proposed. Thus the floor fight over the one-amendment vs. six-amendments question became the critical test.

The idea behind the Rules Committee action was to make it far more difficult for Congress to vote for unpopular spending cuts. For example, a legislator could not tell constituents that he had reluctantly accepted slashes in loans to college students for the sake of enacting the President's total program; he would have to be recorded as voting yes or no on the specific question of student loans.

Also, making a procedural fight the key test gave House leaders the best chance of winning back the 63 Democrats, most of them Southern conservatives, who had voted Reagan's way on the May budget resolution. Party discipline generally holds more firmly on procedural issues than on substantive ones. Worst of all, from the White House viewpoint, Reagan had less than 24 hours to rally his troops before the Thursday floor vote on the Rules Committee recommendation--and the President would have to do it while on the road. He had left Washington on a three-city speaking tour.

Reagan used the time he had to stunning effect. Aboard Air Force One Wednesday afternoon, he rewrote a relatively benign speech he had intended to give to the Jaycees convention in San Antonio. As delivered to a shouting, whistling crowd of more than 8,000, the speech soared with election-rally rhetoric: "These [social] programs have truly turned out to be good intentions run amuck--budgetary time bombs set to explode in the years ahead." En route to Los Angeles, he authorized telegrams to all 190 House Republicans and the 63 Democrats who had voted his way in May.

From his 19th-floor suite in Los Angeles' Century Plaza Hotel, Reagan used Wednesday night and Thursday morning to telephone 19 wavering Congressmen. He reached Jack Hightower of Texas and five other Texas Democrats at dinner in Washington's University Club. They passed a phone around the table so that each could talk to the President.

Louisiana Democrat John Breaux, summoned to the phone as he was dining at Washington's exclusive F Street Club, told Reagan he was undecided on the procedural vote. Shortly afterward, White House aides asked him what it would take to win his support. Breaux, who represents a district that produces sugar, oil and gas, laid down two conditions: the White House should stop opposing a program of federal loans to sugar farmers, and it should start supporting a measure modifying a law that encourages utilities to switch from oil and gas to coal as a fuel. Breaux won: he was notified by House Republican leaders that Stockman had pledged that the White House would drop its opposition to the sugar loans.

The Thursday procedural debate itself got under way in desultory fashion before packed galleries: Republican after Republican took the microphone to drone through speeches designed to stall for time while Reagan continued his telephone work from Los Angeles.

Breaux himself was called off the floor only 30 minutes before the vote by Reagan, who began: "I understand you are interested in the Fuel Use Act. I'm told by my people that we have worked something out. . ."

By the time Wright and Michel took the floor to bring the debate to its fiery conclusion, Reagan's persuasive powers and calculated horse trading had taken effect. Breaux and three of his Louisiana Democratic colleagues, converted by the White House switch on the Fuel Use Act, were among the 217 who voted to uphold the President's position in the rules fight.

By Friday it was all over. Passion had been spent on the rules fight; the debate on the budget bill itself was nonexistent. The Republican substitute for the Democrats' bill was so hastily drafted that it mistakenly included the name (Rita Seymour) and phone number (225-4844) of a Congressional Budget Office aide who had helped draw it up; O'Neill sarcastically asked if she should be enshrined in the annals of the nation's basic laws.

None of that mattered: the Administration's bill, reducing the growth in social spending substantially, passed 217 to 211. Thus the nation embarked on a new direction in government spending, with all the risks that such an adventure involves. Said Charles (Buddy) Roemer, a Louisiana Democrat, of the President's bill: "Nobody knows for sure what's in it. It was purely a take-it-on-faith matter. And I think that few members can forecast how it will affect the economy or the country."

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan and Neil MacNeil/Washington

* The only Republican voting against the President's position, John T. Myers of Indiana, apologized for a mistake; he had used the wrong electronic recording device.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan and Neil MacNeil

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