House Backs Reagan’s Veto of Curb on Foreign Textiles : Override Effort Fails by 8 Votes

WASHINGTON —  The House of Representatives, by a slim eight-vote margin, today sustained President Reagan’s veto of a bill setting stiff limits on textile, clothing and shoe imports.

The 276-149 vote in the Democratic-controlled chamber fell short of the two-thirds majority required to override a veto.

No further action is required in the Republican-led Senate to uphold the President’s December, 1985, veto.

The House vote followed an intensive personal lobbying campaign for undecided members waged by Reagan and top Cabinet officials.

An hour before the final tally, neither side was willing to predict the outcome.

Considerable Support

In an election-year environment of growing frustration over annual trade deficits spiraling toward $170 billion, the import-restraint measure had considerable support in the House that crossed party lines.

Both sides called the textile bill protectionist.

“I’m against protectionism and this is protectionism, there’s no question about it,” House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) conceded shortly before the vote. But he said drastic steps were needed to “send a very vital message to the world.”

But Administration allies contended it would be the wrong message. They held that the measure could trigger global trade wars, invite retaliation by U.S. trading partners and wreck chances for upcoming international trade talks.

The vote followed an animated floor debate on the bill to roll back textile and clothing imports by 30% and to limit shoe imports to no more than 60% of the U.S. market. The measure passed the House last December by a 255-161 majority.

‘An American Fight’

“This is not a partisan fight, this is an American fight,” claimed Rep. Ed Jenkins (D-Ga.), principal sponsor of the bill.

The last time Congress overrode a presidential veto was in November, 1985, when it voted to nullify the veto of a measure authorizing research funds for the the National Institutes of Health.

Textile bill sponsors claimed that an increasing flood of imports, particularly from low-wage Third World nations, had plunged the U.S. industry into a severe slump, eliminating as many as 300,000 textile jobs during the last five years.

But Rep. Sam Gibbons (D-Fla.), chairman of a House trade subcommittee and an opponent of the bill, called such claims “a lot of malarkey” and said some segments of the textile industry were thriving.

Losing Jobs ‘to Machines’

“The American textile industry is the most highly protected industry in the United States,” Gibbons said. “Some of it will survive and some of it will not. Textile jobs will be lost, but they will be lost to machines here in the United States.”

Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) said the bill would make it more difficult to open foreign markets for U.S. goods or argue against unfair trading practices of other nations.

“We cannot expect to be taken seriously by Japan and other nations when we demand that they eliminate their protectionist policies. We will lose our credibility at the negotiating table,” Rostenkowski said.

The Reagan Administration in recent months had negotiated textile pacts with Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong holding import growth at or below 1% a year. But the bill’s supporters said that this was not enough and that they wanted a rollback in imports.