GOP Seeks New Tools to Cut Deficit : Congress: Leaders fear defeat of balanced-budget amendment will weaken party discipline. They’re anxiously crafting new plans to enforce their vows of fiscal restraint.

WASHINGTON —  Republican congressional leaders, conceding that in the absence of a balanced-budget constitutional amendment their party might not have the self-discipline to make deep spending cuts, are scrambling to craft new tax and budget plans they hope will fulfill their promises to reduce the federal budget deficit.

GOP leaders in the House and Senate vow that even without the amendment, which was defeated last week, they will present budgets that show specifically how they plan to move toward balancing the federal books by 2002--the year the amendment was to take effect.

Yet in interviews after the amendment failed, the Republicans acknowledged fears that without the authority of a constitutional amendment, it will be difficult to hold their party ranks together as they try to enact the most painful elements of the House GOP’s “contract with America”--massive spending cuts.

“We had a hammer, and now we don’t,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.).

“I think it makes it much tougher for us to try to balance the budget by 2002,” agreed a senior aide to the House Republican leadership.

President Clinton, apparently sensing that area of vulnerability, chided Republicans at a press conference Friday for failing to move quickly to spell out how they would get to a balanced budget.

The burden is now on the Republicans, he said, to prove that they can live up to their November campaign promises to balance the budget--even if they no longer can rely on a constitutional amendment.

The amendment packed political power, for it would have set a new standard for measuring all future budgets emerging from Washington. Having passed the amendment out of a GOP-controlled Congress, it would have been politically dangerous for the Republicans not to follow through by approving spending cuts needed to comply with the Constitution.

So senior Republicans now worry that the amendment’s defeat could give wavering party members greater political cover to fight for home-state and special-interest spending at the expense of a wide-ranging deficit-reduction campaign.

“Without the discipline, this brings us back to face all of the obstacles we have always faced in Congress, all the reasons we have never been able to address the need to reduce the deficit,” said Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Ida.).

The “contract with America” and many of the spending cuts to pay for it have made swift progress in the House.

As the Senate was defeating the balanced-budget amendment on Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee approved roughly $17 billion in controversial spending cuts in the 1995 budget, slashing low-income housing and Clinton’s national service program. Two other panels have begun the process of cutting $35 billion to $40 billion out of welfare, school lunches and related anti-poverty programs.

Those House savings barely get the Republicans started on the road to a balanced budget because a large portion of the savings must go to offset emergency spending requests by the Administration to pay for disaster relief and military operations in Haiti, Rwanda and elsewhere. Even so, many of those cuts are unlikely to win approval in the Senate, which increasingly seems determined to live up to George Washington’s famous metaphor--serving as the saucer for the House’s hot cup of coffee.

“I think we can maintain our discipline in the House,” said one House leadership aide. “But it may be different in the Senate.”

For instance, on Friday, even as the Republicans were welcoming Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who left the Democratic Party to join the GOP, the newcomer vowed to fight to preserve the school lunch program that he said served him well growing up as an orphaned Native American.

And the defection of a senior Senate Republican, Appropriations Committee Chairman Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, on the amendment vote also demonstrates how tough it may be for the GOP to present a unified front on spending issues.

“I can guarantee you that our (spending) package will be different from the House,” said a senior Hatfield aide on the Appropriations panel, which handles all discretionary spending.

Hatfield, speaking at a subcommittee hearing Thursday on a proposed $2.3-billion cut in transportation funding, warned that “as disappointing as this is, it is fairly tame compared to what lies ahead” if Congress attempts to balance the budget.

And the five-term senator complained about House GOP forces now determined to “cut domestic programs in order to provide middle-class tax relief.”

Other Republican senators also are expressing doubts about central elements of the “contract with America,” including the plan for $200 billion in tax cuts. Several Senate leaders say the tax cut proposal is irresponsible given the party’s pledge to balance the budget in seven years.

Domenici, who has not disguised his dislike of many elements of the contract, privately cautioned other Republican leaders last week that they will need to find $1.4 trillion in savings if they hope to balance the budget by 2002 and also approve the tax cuts and increases in military spending called for in the contract.

If the Senate does not go along with the contract, the Republicans would need $1.1 trillion over seven years, said Domenici, who was assigned by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) to be the Senate’s point man on the budget.

Domenici also said that by May 15, he will present the Senate leadership with a five-year budget plan calling for $450 billion to $550 billion in deficit reductions--far short of what will be needed to achieve balance.

While Domenici promised to take his budget plan out an extra two years to show how the Republicans could achieve a balanced budget by 2002, aides say it is unlikely to offer significant details for those years.

Domenici’s House counterpart, Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio), also vowed to present a balanced budget in the long-term budget resolution he will unveil in late April. He added that, with the defeat of the constitutional amendment, he is scrambling to develop another means of tying the hands of his fellow Republicans to prevent them from bolting when the time comes to cut spending.

Kasich said he will ask them first to vote to approve a drastic lowering of the overall spending ceilings now written into law in the federal budget--and only then demand votes on specific cuts.

“Once we lower the spending caps, they won’t have a choice,” Kasich said.

But even Kasich, perhaps the most zealous budget-cutter in Congress, admitted frustration after the Senate defeat of the constitutional amendment.

“Sure it makes it harder to get what we need, especially in the Senate. But I got to believe that this means too much to Bob Dole and his presidential campaign for him to let it go.”