103rd Congress Grinding to a Halt Amid Partisan Rage : Government: Many lawmakers can’t recall a session more bitterly split. The year is an especially big disappointment for the Democrats.

WASHINGTON —  It was late in the morning of the day before its scheduled adjournment and the Senate had just ground to a halt--not for the first time but perhaps for the last in the ill-starred 103rd Congress.

The Republicans had just killed another major Democratic initiative, lobbying reform, and were launching into another of a long series of filibusters by forcing the Senate clerk to read aloud the entire text of the House-Senate conference report on the California desert bill, a process that would take hours.

With audible groans, weary senators started heading for the doors, emptying the chamber of all but two figures who remained sitting stone-stiff in their seats, glowering at one another across the empty aisles. Like partners in a deadly duet, Sens. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chief protagonists in the desert bill debate, just sat there and stared at one another, each seemingly transfixed by the other’s venomous glare.

Thus is the year on Capitol Hill drawing to a close--with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with a partisan rage so deep that many Democrats and Republicans were barely on speaking terms.

Indeed, as they waited to learn the fate of the desert bill, the last major legislation on the year’s calendar, many lawmakers agreed that they could not recall a Congress that has been more bitterly partisan than this one.

As Democrats struggled to enact President Clinton’s legislative agenda, only to be thwarted by Republicans at nearly every turn, the level of discourse in both the House and Senate sank to a depth that Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento) said was “much more mean-spirited” than any he can remember in his 16 years in Congress.

“The object is no longer to win on an issue but to destroy your opponent,” he lamented. “It’s mean, it’s personal and it’s for keeps.”

For the Democrats, confronting the possibility of their worst electoral losses since 1980, the year was especially disappointing as, one by one, the signature reforms they had hoped to enact after 12 years of divided government went down to defeat, partly because of Republican opposition but also because of major divisions within their own fractious ranks.

In the end, only one of the three main priorities that Clinton set before the Congress in his State of the Union Address was finally passed. But even the luster of their hard-earned victory in passing a landmark crime bill, with its controversial ban on assault weapons intact, was somewhat diminished by the intraparty feuding and the embarrassingly close votes that preceded its adoption in the House.

Into the graveyard, or the legislative limbo of next year, went the grand designs that were supposed to reform health care, welfare and the way money is raised for political campaigns.

Many lawmakers had regarded efforts to reform Congress itself as essential, if painful, first steps toward restoring the public’s badly sagging confidence in government. But that fared no better, with bills to streamline the congressional bureaucracy and ban lawmakers from receiving meals, gifts and travel junkets from lobbyists both falling victim to Republican delaying tactics in the waning hours of the session.

Also stumbling or snarled by gridlock in the final days was Superfund legislation to clean up hazardous wastes, telecommunications reform and a landmark law that would have increased federal royalties on minerals taken from government land. Even the major international trade agreement that enjoyed bipartisan support for most of the year fell victim to conflicting special interests and election year politics, although Congress is scheduled to return in late November for a rare lame duck session to deal with it.

In the corridors of the Capitol on the eve of adjournment, the mood was as foul as anyone could remember. “Normally there’s a great rush at the end of a session to get things passed” so lawmakers can go home and tout their accomplishments to the voters, noted Rep. Timothy J. Penny (D-Minn.). But with “gridlock by filibuster in the Senate and gridlock by procedural votes in the House,” he said, “there is nothing left to do but rap the gavel and get out of here.”

“I have not sensed a greater anxiety, especially among Democrats, since Jimmy Carter led his party to defeat in 1980,” added Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker. “The impending sense of doom and demoralization is palpable.”

Facing the real possibility that Republicans could recapture the Senate for the first time in 10 years and win enough seats in the House to form an alliance with conservative Democrats that would deny Clinton an effective majority next year, Democratic leaders insisted that their stewardship of both Congress and the White House over the last two years had still produced major legislative accomplishments.

“This has been an extraordinarily productive Congress,” insisted House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), citing the crime bill and the North American Free Trade Agreement as “historic” achievements.

“With time and perspective, this Congress will be seen as one of significant accomplishment,” added retiring Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.). As other major initiatives approved by the 103rd Congress, he listed legislation enabling Americans to earn stipends for schooling by performing community service, providing for voter registration at state motor vehicle offices, and requiring larger businesses to grant unpaid leave to employees to deal with family circumstances, such as a new child or a relative’s illness.

But the problem, another senior Democrat privately conceded, is that “perspective is for historians, not voters.” Most of the accomplishments the leadership touted, he noted, occurred in the first year of the two-year congressional session, perhaps too long ago to erase the impression “shared by most of our constituents that this was a do-nothing Congress.”

“It was a productive session if you look at both years but it was also a very messy one and that’s what voters are reacting to,” agreed Penny. “There were too many cliffhanger votes, too much partisanship, too many promises unfulfilled. . . . It’s left a bad taste in peoples’ mouths.”

The Democrats blamed Republican gridlock--”Dr. Frankendole’s monster,” as one Democrat called it, referring to Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Indeed, the GOP filibusters, even of bills that had passed by huge margins earlier in the year, came in such dizzying succession near the end that even some GOP moderates agreed that their leadership, sensing Clinton’s weakness, was bent on denying the Democrats any opportunity to reverse their fortunes before the elections.

To many observers, for instance, it was hard to see a motive that was not political in the Republicans’ refusal to end their filibuster of the lobbying bill even after the Democrats offered to drop the provisions to which the GOP lawmakers had been objecting.

“We agreed to everything they asked for but they still would not let it pass, obviously because they want to deny the President the opportunity of signing a bill that the public supports” before the elections, charged the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

But the partisanship was by no means one way as the Democrats, especially those in the House, sought to deny the GOP any constructive opportunities to influence legislation through a combination of restrictive rule-making and closed-door negotiations.

“There was a growing frustration on our side that we were not even allowed access to the rules of the House, let alone fair play under them,” complained Rep. Fred Grandy (R-Iowa.).

Democrats in the House have “basically treated the Republicans with contempt . . . like they were the idiot children of Congress,” agreed Baker.

The result, several analysts added, was a highly partisan struggle that in recent years helped to push the GOP leadership to the right and the Democrats to the left, leaving a leadership hole in the center that Clinton alone could never manage to fill as he veered first one way and then the other in an effort to win support for his agenda.

“In the House, you had a Democratic caucus controlled by liberals and a Republican caucus controlled by conservatives, with fewer conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress than at any time before,” noted political analyst Charles Cook.

“It was a prescription for gridlock,” he said, adding that if the trend continues into the next Congress, it will raise the question “of whether anything but the farm bill will be able to pass in 1996.”

In the end, even a large and reform-minded freshman class of lawmakers, which brought more women and minorities into Congress than ever before, seemed to splinter and fall victim to division, leaving many of them disillusioned and asking, as Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego) did aloud recently: “What went wrong?”

He was referring to health care reform, but it was a question that many lawmakers were asking about the year in general as they headed home to confront the uphill task of convincing the voters that they can do it better next year.