DATE: Thursday, October 23, 1997            TAG: 9710230496

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A6   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   57 lines

REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS JOIN IN FRUSTRATION OVER CLINTON VETOES

Some pounded the table in frustration with a president who would veto ``my project'' without so much as the courtesy of a phone call.

Others complained of incompetence on the president's staff and threatened to subpoena the objects of their ire to demand an accounting.

Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, members of the House National Security Committee groaned almost as one Wednesday over President Clinton's use of a new line-item veto power to cancel more than $300 million in military construction projects and other defense programs.

Three of the vetoed building projects - including the largest on Clinton's target list, a $19.9 million pier refurbishment at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth - are in Hampton Roads.

``I don't believe anybody at the (Office of Management and Budget) or the White House had a clue'' about the merits of the pier project before Clinton vetoed it, Rep. Norman Sisisky, D-4th District, told his committee colleagues during a hearing on the vetoes. ``Have the decision makers ever been in a naval shipyard?''

But the angry lawmakers all but conceded there is little they can do to reverse Clinton's decisions, many of which the administration now admits were based on inaccurate information about the projects. Overriding the president would require a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress.

``This just makes me feel better,'' Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., admitted after an impassioned speech berating Clinton's decisions. ``We had justification, strong justification I believe, for each and every one'' of the vetoed projects, he said.

But Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, D-Calif., the panel's senior Democrat, said his colleagues' fury over the vetoes was ``a requiem for an ill-advised disfigurement of the Constitution,'' the decision to give the president the new veto authority.

``We would not be here today were it not for the passage of legislation that undid the Constitution's carefully constructed balance of legislative power between the President and the Congress,'' Dellums said. The veto begins ``an era in which the executive (is) allowed to legislate as well.''

Wednesday's two-hour session included testimony from top budgetary officials of each military branch, several of whom conceded that their staffs provided bad information to the White House concerning many of the vetoed projects.

Clinton canceled some projects because the military told him that design work on them was not far enough along to permit construction to begin during 1998. In fact, four vetoed Army projects and an undisclosed number of projects from 13 vetoed Air Force proposals had had at least some design work done, officials testified Wednesday.

Rear Adm. James F. Amerault, the Navy's budget chief, said the service provided accurate information to the White House concerning every project officials there inquired about. But the White House never sought data on three Navy projects Clinton vetoed, including an air operations center at the Norfolk Naval Air Station and the pier project at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

The design of both projects was well underway and actual construction could have started in 1998, congressmen backing the projects asserted.

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