Stumbling to a Showdown

Finally a showdown in the lengthy struggle over the new 1983 federal budget is at hand. With nothing less than the fate of the nation's economy hanging in the balance, key White House aides as well as congressional leaders agree that time is running out in the search for compromise between a stubbornly intransigent President and a suddenly unified but totally unpredictable Congress. This week is the week of decision. Yet there is no certainty whatever that either side will prove capable of reaching one.

"We keep dancing around the fire," observed South Carolina's Democratic Senator Fritz Rollings last week. "Now we must put up or shut up." Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, probably the Senate's most effective Majority Leader since the days of Lyndon Johnson, agrees: "We've got to do it this week" (see following story). Informally, the contending parties facing off along Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue have set a midweek deadline for ending four weeks of delicate, closed-door negotiations over the budget.

It is an unusual situation. For the first time in 50 years, the two houses of Congress are controlled by different parties.

Nonetheless, their leaders are in unanimous agreement that President Reagan has sent them a budget for fiscal 1983 (which begins Oct. 1, 1982) with deficits so high that they simply cannot, and will not, approve it. Even Reagan's most loyal aides know that their boss must accept a compromise budget package that will sharply lower those deficits, but they live in fear that he might not do so.

Stepping into that political quicksand, the adroit Senate Majority Leader is attempting a most difficult feat. Baker is deftly challenging the economic beliefs of a President from his own party, while trying to preserve party unity. After leading Senate Republicans into solid support of Reagan's budget and tax policies last year, he is backing their resistance this year but trying to channel it to achieve a constructive compromise with the President. All the while, Baker is struggling to prevent chaotic fragmentation in a Congress in which undisciplined procedures and election-year insecurities work strongly against cooperative action on behalf of the nation's best interests, rather than those of the individual Senators. If Baker manages to rescue his party, his President and himself from this potential quagmire, he will deserve the continued admiration of his colleagues in one of the nation's most harassed and most criticized institutions.

With the deadline looming, Washington endured a week that vacillated from a heady optimism to perhaps an overly pessimistic gloom. It ended with a general consensus that the chances of the key players reaching agreement this week were, at best, only fifty-fifty.