Accusations, Not Answers In Standoff
President Clinton and congressional Republicans traded increasingly fevered accusations over the budget Saturday but made no move to end the second government shutdown in a month, leaving tourists stranded at national monuments and federal employees uncertain about reporting to work Monday.
Clinton met with 40 congressional Democrats for nearly two hours Saturday afternoon, but to little apparent effect. Participants emerged from the session pretty much as they had gone in, blaming Republicans and saying there was no end in sight to the crisis.
Earlier, during his weekly radio address, the president cranked up the political decibel level by accusing the Republican Party of using the shutdown to jam through heartless and unnecessary spending cuts.
“Let them threaten to shut the government down,” Clinton said. “It is not necessary to do this to balance the budget, and so I am not going to let them hurt our children and compromise their future.”
Republicans were no less ferocious in their rhetoric, with Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas calling on Clinton to “stop that garbage he’s spewing on his radio program and everything else,” and Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio labeling the president’s remarks “shameful, absolutely shameful.”
The latest crisis was provoked Friday when administration negotiators offered a new budget proposal that called for Republicans to give ground in an area where GOP bargainers thought they had reached agreement - on economic assumptions.
The White House move, together with the president’s assertion Friday and again Saturday that Republicans walked out of the budget talks after the administration refused to agree to extra cutbacks in Medicare and Medicaid, sent a tremor of anger through GOP ranks.
In short order, Dole and two other Republican senators took to the Senate floor to accuse Clinton of lying, and House members rejected their leaders’ call for extending a temporary spending measure to keep the government operating through Tuesday.
As has been true all year, the big difference between the two sides centers on spending reductions that Republicans want in Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment that the administration says are too deep, and a GOP tax cut the White House asserts is too large. But much of the argument continued to focus on the side issue of economic assumptions.
GOP leaders indicated little willingness Saturday to yield on their central demand that the White House offer a budget that can be balanced in seven years using Congressional Budget Office assumptions. Clinton’s most recent budget uses more optimistic White House assumptions and growth figures.
“We’re not talking to them unless they give us a balanced budget in seven years,” House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia was quoted as saying.
xxxx IMPACT OF SHUTDOWN Unless a temporary funding measure is approved today, 260,000 of the federal government’s 2 million civilian employees will show up for work Monday morning only to be sent home. Most essential services will continue uninterrupted. Among them: mail delivery; the processing of Social Security checks, Medicaid, cash welfare benefits and food stamps; weather forecasting and air traffic control. The White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, the Treasury and Agriculture Department offices will be open. But passport offices were expected to remain closed Monday, except for emergencies.