Cracks Emerge in Parties’ New Partnership : Politics: Democrats and Republicans trade barbs over economy. Conflict centers on details of balanced-budget amendment.

WASHINGTON —  The political truce that President Clinton and the Republican majority in Congress declared late last week broke down in a war of words on the nation’s TV talk shows Sunday as Democrats and Republicans clashed over spending cuts, taxes and a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Accusing Clinton of firing the first shot by distorting the remarks that he and other GOP leaders made at a White House meeting last Thursday, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) said the President had “no connection with reality” when he suggested that the Republicans have conceded that the trickle-down economics of the Ronald Reagan Administration were a mistake.

“How can we reach out” to Democrats, Armey complained on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” when “we make our best effort and come out and run into a thing like this?”

“This is not a very productive way to build a new partnership between the Democratic President and the Republican Congress. This is absolutely without foundation,” he added.

With the “new partnership” dissolving in about the time it takes the average Bosnian cease-fire to collapse, the battleground shifted to the economy as Republican and Democratic congressional leaders squared off on the economic planks of the House GOP’s “contract with America.”

Led by Vice President Al Gore, the Democrats pressed ahead with their attacks on the Republicans’ refusal to specify which programs they would cut in order to pay for their proposed tax cuts while still balancing the federal budget by the year 2002, as mandated by the constitutional amendment they are advocating.

“This group that is talking about an amendment . . . without saying how they will do it is the same group that quadrupled the national debt the last time they had the reins of government,” Gore said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.”

“They’re asking the American people to buy a pig in the poke,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) on “Meet the Press.” “They’re saying: ‘Look, we are prepared to balance the budget, but we’re not going to tell you how.’ ”

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and other GOP leaders responded to the Democratic criticism by saying it was impossible to be specific about the types or amounts of the spending cuts that will be necessary to balance the budget in seven years because much will hinge on how the economy performs in the meantime.

But Armey conceded that another reason for the Republican reticence to be specific was that the will to pass a balanced-budget amendment by the required two-thirds majority in the House and Senate would quickly evaporate if all the cuts were spelled out in advance.

“Once members of Congress know exactly, chapter and verse, the pain that the government must live with in order to get to a balanced government, their knees will buckle,” he said.

Various estimates have suggested that balancing the budget by 2002 will require anywhere from $750 billion to $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next seven years, and one report said House Republicans were told in a briefing last month that the projected growth of Medicare would have to be trimmed by nearly $500 billion over that same period in order to meet the constitutional mandate.

Dole said on CNN’s “Late Edition” that any discussion of specific numbers was premature but that everything would be subject to cuts except Social Security.

“You start with A, you start with Amtrak, you start with agriculture. You go all through the alphabet, way down to the Zs,” Dole said.

Sparring with Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas suggested that one area of substantial savings could be achieved by scrapping the entire Department of Education.

“I think we could eliminate the Department of Education and give half the money back to parents and half the money to local school boards,” he said.

But Gramm said Congress should pass the balanced-budget amendment before making those kinds of decisions because lawmakers won’t have the discipline to make the cuts unless they are forced to do so.

“I’m for the balanced-budget amendment not because it solves the problem, but because it puts a good stone wall to your back in a gunfight for the people who are serious” about balancing the budget, he said.

But echoing the Democrats’ strategy of trying to force the Republicans into listing what would almost certainly be an unpopular array of program cuts, Dodd retorted that the balanced-budget amendment was a “gutless wonder . . . (and) a gimmick” that would allow Republicans to claim credit for balancing the books without actually doing so.

“Why don’t we also include in the Constitution the eradication of ignorance, poverty and disease and make it a bulletin board for every New Year’s wish that we might have?” he asked sarcastically.