U.S.

Rough Ride On This Tobacco Road

June 12, 1998 / 4:46 PM EDT / AP

After weeks of partisan combat, Republican and Democratic Senate leaders decided to give compromise a chance, boosting the prospects for comprehensive tobacco legislation and an election-year tax cut as well.

Still, numerous hurdles remain before the measure to crack down on teen smoking can clear the Senate, or the House where Speaker Newt Gingrich has recently stepped up his attack, or reach President Clinton's desk.

"There are so many more pitfalls out there. This thing could still go haywire quickly," Democratic leader Tom Daschle told reporters. "So it's way too early to say that we're out of the woods."

In the Senate, where the bill has been on the floor for nearly three weeks, Democrat Wendell Ford of Kentucky pledges to wage a one-man battle to protect farmers in his state if a provision to phase out the existing tobacco program isn't dropped.

On the other side of the Senate chamber, GOP conservatives are ready with a seemingly endless stack of amendments in a further attempt to sink the bill.

Yet the most pressing question has to do not with the finer points of tobacco policy, but with the intentions of Majority Leader Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who has annoyed some of his GOP colleagues by helping to move the bill along.

With his support, the 60 votes to choke off debate would presumably materialize swiftly, and the bill would pass shortly thereafter. Without his help, there's every chance the measure will die a lingering death.

"I haven't decided" what to do, he told one reporter late last week as he walked onto the Senate floor.

GOP critics of the bill expect he will eventually take action to facilitate final passage. "I've always had that fear," remarked Texas Republican Phil Gramm. "I hope he doesn't," added the second-in-command in the GOP leadership, Don Nickles of Oklahoma.

The bill survived a brush with death this week.

Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, first elected to his seat in 1962, told reporters the past few days had produced "about as dramatic a shift and change in the United States Senate as I have seen."

Last weekend, Lott, angered that Daschle had decided to force a series of votes to end debate, told a television interviewer the measure was "dead in the water."

A few days later, it popped back up again, tax cuts were approved, a major GOP anti-drug provision was adopted, and the bill's prospects improved markedly.

In a Senate where policy fights often are transformed into parliamentary deadlock, it took a compromise over procedure to move the bill along.

After weeks of refusing to agree to vote on drugs or taxes, Lott and Daschle worked out a plan to permit votes on both.

Republicans quickly won both, as Democrats had known they would, thereby placing their own election-year stamp on what started out as a bill backed principally b Democrats and the White House.

Daschle said Lott had a change of heart after Democrats began forcing Republicans through a series of daily votes on whether to end debate, thereby placing the GOP in the position of appearing to do the bidding of Big Tobacco. Lott, characteristically, isn't saying what prompted the shift.

Some Democrats, at least, chose to focus on the fresh momentum that had been imparted to the legislation rather than the Republican successes.

"I think it's important for us to look at the overall context of the bill," said Daschle. He listed several items as priorities: FDA authority to regulate nicotine; penalties for cigarette companies that fail to meet targets for reduced sales; a provision to raise the price of cigarettes.

As drafted, the bill would raise the price of cigarettes by $1.10 a pack and collect hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 25 years to help the states pay for smoking-related health care costs. It also would finance disease research and an anti-smoking campaign.