Reagan budget defeated

It used to be Gary Cooper who responded to a threat from the local bad man with a phrase so simple, yet so menacing that it rang, or rather crept, first around America and then around the world. Cooper looked the man square down in the eye and said, 'Smile, when you say that!'.

Well this famous cliché has finally expired with the arrival on the scene of a more cynical, but equally idealistic variation on the Cooper character, in the person of Clint Eastwood. Who will forget that moment in the movie 'Sudden Impac't, except, of course, the people who never saw it, when a gunman makes a threatening move towards our all-American good guy who says, 'Go ahead and make my day!'.

There was a time, I once read, when the not-very secret ambition of Ronald Reagan was to be the next Gary Cooper. For various reasons, having to do mainly with acting ability or disability, but also, I think, because you couldn't have two Gary Coopers, Reagan never made it. Until last Wednesday. The president was talking to a meeting of big businessmen, corporation presidents and the like, and when he came in to talk to them, he'd just received a bitter pill from the Senate, or rather from the Senate budget committee whose job it is to go over the budget for 1986 that the president submitted in January and revise it, allow this, disallow that.

Since the Republicans are in a majority in the Senate, they have a majority on all the committees and the chairmen of those committees are, you might say, the president's men. There are 12 Republicans on the budget committee and 10 Democrats. You could expect, therefore, that any accommodation the whole committee would make in its budget recommendations would lean in the president's favour.

Well, the committee went over the president's budget line by line – cut so much from welfare, from student loans, peg social security, eliminate all subsidies for mass transportation, allow a healthy increase in defence spending, so on! The committee didn't even soften its blows. Most of the Republicans, including the chairman, joined all the Democrats and by an overwhelming vote rejected the president's budget, the whole caboodle. Mr Reagan had had wind of this coming humiliation before he talked to the businessmen and, for once, he dropped his perpetual affability, the look he maintains in good times and bad, of the most happy fella. He was bristling with frustration.

The budget committee had let him know that not only was it going to maintain or freeze social programmes that the president wanted to trim or eliminate, it was going – in fact, later in the day, it did – reduce military spending and increase it next year only enough to stay in step with the three, four, per cent inflation that's expected. All in all, the committee means to cut $55 billion from the deficit and, nastiest word of all, they let it be known that to to this, they would begin to dream up new taxes.

Now you may remember that the president had said during the campaign and time and again afterwards that he would allow new taxes 'over my dead body'. Well, he stood before the businessmen and denounced the Senate committee, accused it of planning to squander the people's money and then he said, 'I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers, go ahead and make my day!'. It got an immediate roaring response. If it was a triumph of a sort it will be short-lived.

This whole session of the Senate budget committee highlights, yet again, the folly we all indulge of headlining any president's proposals when they're made as if they were edicts. For at least two months now, the papers and the television commentators have been talking about the president's budget as a settled policy of the second Reagan administration. We always do it. LBJ will do this, Carter will raise defence budget, Reagan to slash social spending and maintain big arms build up.

Well, the president's budget, like any other proposal that must be legislated by the Congress before it can ever become a policy, is no more than a suggestion, a plea, a cry for help. Two weeks ago, when the members of the Senate budget committee were being sounded out about the prospects of the president getting all he wanted or a half or less, one of his own men said, 'The day the budget lands on the committee table, it will be a dead duck'.

Before we move on to other matters, let me just remind you of the process in the American system, so different from a parliamentary system, the process of passing, or rather reshaping and then passing, a national budget.

First, the president goes to work with his advisers, especially with his director of the budget and the secretary of the treasury. He finds out what his Cabinet officers want – defence, agriculture, so on. He puts together his budget and sends it first to the Senate's budget committee which has now rejected it in toto, but has then put together its own budget in the form of a resolution which will now go to the Senate floor and can, of course, be drastically amended there.

Whatever comes out of the Senate debate then goes to a conference of Senate and House leaders and they reshape and rewrite it. And when that's done, there will be a resolution expressing the sense of the Congress. It does not break down its recommendations into detailed amounts for this and that. It sets general targets, limits on spending for defence, say, for social programmes, so on.

The president cannot veto that resolution, those spending limits but, after that, the thing goes to the House of Representatives which is the keeper of the purse. Once so much money has been authorised for anything, the House has the last word on appropriations, on who gets how much, for what.

Now, once the final budget has been passed into law, then a president can veto it and toss the whole problem back to the Senate committee, the full Senate, the Senate House conference, the floor of the House. In theory, the president can go on doing this – in fact, he simply cannot – put the telescope up to his blind eye and see no sign of defeat.

Somewhere along the way, he's going to have to do what every president does and hates to do. He has to accept the best the Congress will give him. So, please, let's have no more talk about Reagan's horrendous budget! It has already been buried.

Only two things, at this stage, seem to be clear. There is going to be a drastic reduction in the rate of increase of military spending, something close to a freeze and, as Senator Dole, the Republican majority leader, the president's leader in the Senate, put it, 'There are going to be new taxes, sure as you're born'. It will then remain to be seen what famous idiom the president will recall to excuse himself from keeping his promise to lie down and die before any new tax is raised. If anybody in Washington still reads Dickens these days, the president might say, 'When I said you could raise taxes over my dead body, I meant it only in a Pickwickian sense'.

So, you can see how sincere the president was when mentioning the other night that he would not be going to Mr Chernenko's funeral. He said, 'I have a lot on my plate right here'. And that's true, but nobody doubts that if the dead leader had been the head of an allied government, he would have been there. His trip would have entailed appalling security problems and the White House dropped a hint that he was not disposed to stand out in the Moscow cold with colleagues of the stripe of Colonel Gaddafi.

The death of Mr Chernenko, so long anticipated, raised one, small, morbid question about the Russians' acute sensitivity to the idea that their leaders are mortal up to the very last moment when you have to admit the fact. The last pictures we saw of Mr Chernenko, taken from Russian television, showed him about to vote in the general election and, much later, he was seen receiving congratulations on his election to his district. About nine hours had transpired between his visit to the polling booth and his reception of his admirers, but the curtains he was standing against in both pictures were the same. Of course, you could say that since he had no opponent in his district, there'd be no point in carting television gear all round Moscow against the breathless moment when the word of his victory came in wherever he was. So why not film him voting and then bring on the congratulators right away and film the celebration at the same time?

However it was done, it was meant to show him – on the edge of death – as hale and ready for a new term. I suppose we all knew it was coming once the news was out that a Soviet trade delegation in San Francisco had abruptly turned round and headed for home. And then the Soviet radio followed its usual practice of killing the regular programmes and playing only sombre classical music.

One curious slip made here led to a quite different guess at what had happened. I caught the news around midnight the day before the death was announced. It was a swift bulletin mentioning the arrival of the Soviet arms control experts in Geneva and then, after an interruption, a statement that the delegation had no sooner arrived than it had gone home.

At that point, the natural inference was that the delegation was the Russian's Geneva delegation. This led to a quick search for Russian experts, with which Washington and various research institutes abound, to explain why the arms controllers had come and gone.

Could it be that since the Americans had arrived in Geneva with instructions from the president on no account to discuss even negotiating the Star Wars plan, could it be that the Russians were demonstrating in the most dramatic and disheartening way that, for them, the talks would have no point at all?

Well, very soon the mistake was corrected. The right delegation was identified and, mercifully, the Kremlinologists were gagged and we were left with the knowledge that, at the beginning of the talks, anyway, the Russians have a solid propaganda advantage. They have successfully bemoaned the American initiative in planning research into a space defence and somehow managed to keep from the world the knowledge that for three or four years, at least, they have been the pioneer researchers in that very field.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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