House Approves Kinder, Gentler Gop Budget On Party-Line Vote Democrats Warn Another Stalemate Looms

The House Thursday voted 226 to 195 along party lines to approve a new GOP balanced budget and tax-cut plan that was streamlined and moderated by Republicans to enhance their election year prospects.

But budget hawks, led by House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, said they would not abandon some of the more revolutionary features of last year’s budget plan, especially a big tax cut.

Democrats already were condemning the new budget as a reprise of last year’s “extremist” Republican policies and warned that the two sides could be headed for another budget stalemate. “It’s deja vu all over again,” said House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.). “It is deep dismantling cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, education and the environment to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.”

This kind of Democratic attack was precisely what departing Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, had hoped to avoid in shaping the new plan for balancing the budget by 2002.

A year ago, House GOP leaders took the lead in drafting the balanced budget and tax cut policies which led to a showdown with President Clinton and two government shutdowns. This time, coaxed by Dole and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., House GOP leaders agreed to scale back their tax cuts and support smaller reductions in the rate of growth in Medicare, Medicaid and welfare.

In all, the new six-year GOP budget plan approved by the House and awaiting a final vote in the Senate provides about $700 billion of spending savings over six years - including $168 billion in Medicare, $72 billion in Medicaid, $53 billion in welfare and $296 billion in general government and defense - while providing $122 billion of tax relief in the form of a $500 per child family tax credit.

By contrast, the GOP Congress last year approved a seven-year budget plan that called for Medicare savings of $226 billion, Medicaid savings of $133 billion and far ranging personal and business tax cuts totalling $228 billion.

But Kasich has frustrated the Senate GOP strategy by repeatedly declaring that the new plan in no ways marks a retreat from last year’s Republican revolution.