ASHINGTON - President Clinton and congressional leaders met yesterday and moved toward ending their yearlong budget war. Both sides said afterward that next week could bring an accord and an end to the fractious 106th Congress.
''We hope to be able to finish for the year and this Congress before the end of next week,'' Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said after a meeting in the Oval Office that lasted more than an hour.
''Everyone agreed that it was important to try to sit down and get some of this work done,'' White House spokesman Jake Siewert said. ''So those who just want to pack up and go home have not carried the day.''
Siewert's remark seemed aimed at House majority whip Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, who has taken an aggressive stance during the standoff over four overdue spending bills.
Lott and House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois - along with the White House, top Democrats, and many weary lawmakers of both parties - are eager for a deal. That would bring down the curtain on a Congress that began in 1999 with Clinton's Senate impeachment trial and is ending with talk that the House might have to decide whether George W. Bush or Al Gore becomes president on Jan. 20. Many GOP leaders want to end the budget battle to give a Bush presidency a fresh start next year. Democrats are eager to lock in big spending increases for social programs.
Lott and other GOP leaders still want Clinton to agree to deeper cuts in a massive $350 billion education, labor, and health bill.
Clinton has offered a $2 billion reduction in a record $18 billion increase that bargainers tentatively agreed to last month for hiring teachers, modernizing schools, and for other programs. Republicans asked yesterday that the cut be closer to $6 billion.
The GOP proposed that the reduction come from a combination of scaling back particular programs plus a 2 percent across-the-board reduction in much of the bill, said a Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity.
On immigration, one of the unresolved issues, Republicans made an offer ''that is close to what we can accept,'' said one Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity. The GOP offer would help immigrants, including relatives of permanent residents applying for residency. But it ignores Clinton's far broader proposal to legalize all illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States before 1986 and many Central American political refugees.
The GOP also seems ready to accept an extra $1.7 billion over five years that Clinton wants in Medicare and Medicaid benefits for rural and home health care, teaching hospitals and other areas, said one GOP aide. That would be added to a $30 billion, five-year boost in Medicare reimbursements for health care providers both parties have sought.
