Session Without End, Amen

By George J. Church. Reported by Neil MacNell/ Washington

Congress sputters toward an undistinguished adjournment

The federal calendar set one deadline: the Government began a new fiscal year last Monday and needed fresh authority from Congress to continue spending money. The legislators had fixed a second deadline: they agreed to strive for adjournment Thursday so that they could go home and campaign full-time for reelection. Religion posed a third deadline: Congress decided not to legislate past sundown Friday, the beginning of Yom Kippur, in deference to its Jewish members.

So what did Congress do? Miss all three deadlines, naturally. On Monday, it renewed Government spending authority for three days; on Thursday, it renewed the renewal until 6 p.m. Friday. But House and Senate conferees could not agree by then on the provisions of a catch-all $460 billion "continuing resolution" to fund the Government for a whole year. So Congress gave itself another extension until Tuesday of this week, when the legislators will have to return to deal with the measure. Barring a presidential veto, which would force still another session, the 98th Congress will then pass into history, leaving a two-year record that might charitably be called undistinguished.

That would be far too mild an adjective to describe the near anarchy last week. Important legislation, notably on immigration and civil rights, appeared doomed. Other significant bills whistled through with minimal consideration; the House passed a far-reaching package of anticrime measures after ten minutes of debate.

Long hours (all night in the Senate Wednesday), obstructionist tactics and partisan maneuvering caused many tempers to snap. "Shame on the Senate! Shame on the Senate!" cried Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy after the upper chamber dropped the civil rights bill. Barry Goldwater stormed that because of haggling over the catch-all spending bill, Senators collectively were "beginning to look like jackasses"; his Republican colleague, Wyoming's Malcolm Wallop, wondered why the Arizonan had only said "beginning." In the House, Democrat James Jones embarrassed the G.O.P. by introducing a plan requiring Presidents to submit each year a budget proposal that is in balance, along with whatever unbalanced proposal that they might consider more realistic. "Phony!" shouted Robert Walker of Pennsylvania.

"A sham," said Tom Loeffler of Texas.

Then both Republicans voted for the measure, and it passed. The Senate ignored it.

When all the shouting was over, Congress would wind up doping little more than it absolutely could not avoid. In an era when monster deficits and the politically unpopular steps that might reduce them seem about equally intolerable to many legislators, Congress's budget-making process has broken down completely. As has become its deplorable habit, the legislature came to the end of a fiscal year with the great majority of appropriations bills--nine of 13 in this case--unpassed. Once again, Congress had to bundle money for defense expenditures, most social spending and even some routine housekeeping chores into a gargantuan continuing resolution.

In the meantime, Congress passed stopgap measures to keep the Government running for a few days or hours.

When the first of these expired on Thursday, the Reagan Administration sent some 400,000 "nonessential" federal workers around the country home at noon, supposedly shutting down the Government. Democrats in Congress accused the President of staging an unnecessary "Hollywood extravaganza" to put pressure on them. Reagan retorted that the blame lay with "the majority party in the House." Actually, it had been the Republican-controlled Senate rather than the Democratic-controlled House that had held up most appropriations bills.

The continuing resolution inevitably became weighted down with irrelevant riders and enmeshed in heated controversy. Among the big stumbling blocks this year was the House vote to cut off U.S. aid to the contra guerrillas battling the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, while the Senate insisted on continuing to fund the contras. Also the House voted to authorize pork-barrel water projects that eventually might cost $18 billion; the Senate, sensitive to a threat of presidential veto, refused.

In the adjournment rush, important legislation always gets trampled; this year's examples were more consequential than usual:

Immigration. The Simpson-Mazzoli bill combined amnesty for many aliens already in the U.S. with criminal penalties against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants in the future. Differing versions passed both Senate and House earlier this year. At week's end a conference committee was still struggling to find a way to placate Hispanics who feared the bill would encourage discrimination against them. Salvaging the bill would take a "miracle," said a House aide.

Civil Rights. Heavy majorities of both houses favored a bill, attached as a rider to the continuing resolution, that would have overturned a Supreme Court decision and ordered the Government to stop all financial aid to any institution that discriminates in any manner. The Senate voted 92 to 4 to break a filibuster by Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah against the bill. Hatch then threatened to offer 1,000-odd amendments and demand a vote on each. Oregon Republican Bob Packwood, a prime shaper of the civil rights bill, reluctantly moved to kill his own legislation and clear the decks for the continuing resolution. The Senate agreed.

The anticrime package, by contrast, benefited from time pressure and partisan bickering. Some major provisions would end parole for federal prisoners, provide guidelines for judges to set fixed-length sentences for those convicted of federal crimes, and authorize imprisonment for defendants awaiting trial whom a judge considers too dangerous to release on bail.

Democrats controlling the House had tried to break up the legislation into a number of separate bills, rather than passing intact a package that bore a Reagan Administration label. But House Republicans brought up the whole package as a rider to the continuing resolution, even though no committee hearings had ever been held on some of the provisions. Their motive was primarily to embarrass the Democrats. The ploy worked: the pack age sailed easily through both House and Senate.

The closing chaos was a fitting fade-out for the 98th Congress. Its finest hour was its first; almost as soon as it convened in early 1983, it passed a bipartisan pack age of tax and benefit changes urgently needed to save the Social Security system from bankruptcy. But from there on, bickering between the Republican White House and Senate and the Democratic House blocked most positive accomplishments, an unhappy augury of what might be expected in the next two years if voters maintain that same power alignment.

In this year's session Congress did pass some significant tax increases, but otherwise its accomplishments were limited to such matters as requiring stronger warning labels on cigarette packs and prodding states to set a minimum drinking age of 21. But amid all the frenzy of the adjournment rush, the legislators found time to designate the usual assortment of special months and weeks. National Medical Transcriptionist Week, for example, will start May 21, and Smokey Bear Week will kick off Aug. 5. All that is left now is for this week to become Congress Finally Whimpers to a Close Week.

-- By George J. Church.

Reported by Neil MacNell/ Washington

With reporting by Neil MacNell/ Washington