It’s Mean Season In Congress Politics Bring Legislative Process To A Halt

The legislative process came to a sudden halt in the Senate on Wednesday as Republicans and Democrats divided into hostile factions behind the two leaders poised to represent their parties in the presidential election this fall.

President Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the rival candidates, traded acrimonious charges in the debate over a proposed increase in the minimum wage and a cut in the federal gasoline tax. Efforts to find common ground collapsed under election-year politics.

The partisan tension in the chamber was palpable throughout the afternoon. Nerve ends were raw and the ritualistic courtesy of the Senate broke down repeatedly.

“Maybe we should hire a band, too,” said a disgusted Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., fuming at the state of paralysis. “It’s like a campaign event in there, or maybe a convention.”

Clinton called a short-notice White House news conference in the early afternoon, ostensibly to offer the hand of bipartisan cooperation to congressional Republicans.

But with the other hand, he delivered a sharp partisan slap, accusing Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., of inserting “deadly poison pill” provisions into popular bills to provoke him to veto them.

He offered to work with his political antagonists on the minimum wage and gas tax relief, along with welfare reform, immigration, health care and balanced budget legislation.

But then Clinton quickly changed his tone and sneeringly accused Dole and Gingrich of promoting an agenda consisting solely of “extremism, deadlock and government shutdowns.”

Dole immediately called a counter-news conference to mock Clinton’s “bipartisan, whatever, statement.” He urged Clinton to order his chief Democratic operatives on the Hill - Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. - to abandon the filibusters and other parliamentary maneuvers that are blocking GOP initiatives.

“We think what we’ve offered is good medicine” - not poison pills, Dole said, addressing himself directly to the president he wants to unseat.

“We’ll continue to send you common-sense legislation,” Dole said, daring Clinton to veto the bills and provide fodder for campaign advertisements in the fall.

With the election only six months away, the capital was prepared for a congressional session heavily freighted with campaign politics.

But the stage production of acid-laced partisanship, enveloping virtually all business moving through the political process, still made for an impressive spectacle.

This was to have been the week that Dole marshaled through the Senate a gas-tax repeal and a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. These may be relatively small victories in themselves, but they would be huge boosts for a campaign that has wandered since Dole clinched the GOP presidential nomination in March.

Instead, the Democrats once more had thwarted the will of Dole and the GOP majority in the Senate through a variety of parliamentary maneuvers and a refusal to bargain on the two items that Dole wanted most badly - the 4.3-cent federal gas tax repeal and a labor-law measure that would allow creation of worker-management councils outside formal union channels.

Kennedy denounced the labor measure, the so-called “Team Act,” as the “anti-workplace democracy act” and said it was a thinly disguised effort by business interests to bust unions.

Dole wanted to attach the measure to the 90-cents-an-hour increase in the minimum wage.

Thus Clinton’s charge that Dole was lacing legislation with poison pills and his angry insistence that Congress send him “clean” bills to raise the $4.25-an-hour minimum wage and rescind the 4.3-cent gas tax imposed as part of Clinton’s 1993 deficit reduction package.

Clinton said if he got both bills in simple form, he would sign them. But he pointedly refused to say whether he would accept a gas tax cut unless accompanied by the minimum wage increase.

Dole proposed that the Senate vote on a single package combining the Team Act, the minimum wage increase and the repeal of the 1993 gas tax. He seemed to waver on severing the linkage of the three measures for a time Wednesday but quickly retreated.