HILL KILLS 3 DOMESTIC BILLS IN END-OF-SESSION FLURRY

Congress buried three major domestic initiatives for the year yesterday as the House upheld President Bush's veto of legislation to permit abortion counseling in family planning clinics and the Senate abandoned education and crime bills in the face of unbreakable Republican filibusters.

But the Senate revived -- at least temporarily -- a bill to ease the administration's ban on research using tissue from aborted fetuses. Voting 85 to 12, it blocked a filibuster by antiabortion conservatives but marked time into the night as opposing forces attempted to reach a compromise that might avert a veto by Bush.

After about six hours of on-and-off negotiations, Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) told the Senate that the dozen holdouts were "preventing action by further delays" and said negotiations would resume when the Senate reconvenes today.

The actions came as the House and Senate struggled to complete their work for the year and prepared for weekend sessions in hopes of adjourning Monday or Tuesday.

A 266 to 148 vote in the House, 10 short of the two-thirds majority needed to override Bush's veto, left in place regulations that took effect Thursday barring most health professionals from providing information about abortion to clients of federally funded family planning clinics. It was the second time that Congress sustained a Bush veto on the abortion counseling issue. The ban was proposed in the last months of the Reagan administration and upheld by the Supreme Court last year on First Amendment grounds.

The Senate voted 73 to 26 Thursday to override the latest Bush veto, with 20 Republicans joining all but three Democrats on a vote that opponents of the regulations hoped would put momentum on their side. But the House came only a couple of votes closer than in the past to an override as 107 Republicans and 41 Democrats, mostly southern conservatives and northern Catholics, voted to retain the regulations. Voting to override were 209 Democrats, 56 Republicans and one independent.

Opponents of what they call a "gag rule" held out hope that U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey would grant an injunction, but he had not acted on their request yesterday.

Some family planning clinics have vowed to defy the rules, which bar any staff members except physicians from counseling about the termination of pregnancies. Opponents of the ban say some clinics may have to close. About 4 million low-income women use the 4,000 clinics.

The regulations were described by opponents as according second-class treatment to poor pregnant women, while more affluent women can pay to hear advice about a full range of medical options. Supporters said the restrictions are aimed only at avoiding taxpayer subsidies of abortion counseling and at protecting a national consensus for government funding of family planning services.

This was Bush's 35th straight veto that was upheld by Congress.

The $822 million education bill, approved earlier by House-Senate conferees without most of the key features sought by Bush, died in the Senate when Democrats fell one vote short of the 60 needed for cloture and got strong Republican signals that they would never be able to do any better. The largely party-line vote was 59 to 40.

Only Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), both of whom face tight reelection contests, broke ranks with their GOP colleagues to support cloture and bring the legislation to a vote before adjournment.

The bill already had been approved by the House, although it appeared unlikely that the House could muster the two-thirds required to override an expected veto by Bush.

The main provision would have authorized $800 million in state grants to encourage experiments aimed at improving schools. Omitted were Bush's proposal to allow federal subsidies for children in private and parochial schools, but the bill did include limited support for his plans to loosen federal regulations and develop voluntary curriculum content standards and voluntary national tests in mathematics and science.

The Senate debate was punctuated with reminders of the importance of the debate over school overhaul in the presidential campaign. Republicans accused Democrats of turning the schools issue into an "election-year football," while Democrats accused the administration of hanging tough for private school aid in order to curry favor of blue-collar urban Catholic voters, as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) contended at a news briefing after the vote.

The Senate action means Bush will conclude his term as an avowed "education president" without signing one piece of legislation designed to improve elementary and secondary schools.

The Democratic-sponsored crime bill, including a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases, also died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop a Republican filibuster as the Senate, voting 55 to 43, fell five votes short of the 60 needed for cloture on the bill.

"This bill is not an anti-crime bill; it is a pro-criminal bill," argued Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) in accusing the Democrats of watering down administration proposals to impose tougher penalties, especially capital punishment.

Not so, said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.). "This is about G-U-N-S . . . and the power of the NRA {National Rifle Association} ," Biden said, suggesting that the administration was doing the bidding of the powerful pro-gun lobby.

On fetal tissue research, the Senate attempted to compromise with Bush by incorporating into its new bill a tissue bank set up by Bush last May before he vetoed an earlier bill to overturn the ban on use of aborted fetuses. Under the new proposal, the ban would continue through next May. After then, researchers could use aborted fetuses if the bank could not meet their research needs.

But abortion foes contended this might still encourage abortions, and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) accused the bill's sponsors of "a cynical attempt to provoke a veto by the president . . . to show he's insensitive to fetal tissue research."

Shortly before the vote, Hatch suggested a further compromise under which the ban would be extended for two years. Kennedy countered with 18 months. While no agreement was reached, the exchange offered enough hope for an agreement to prompt several hours of negotiations both on and off the Senate floor, which eventually were broadened to include several House conservatives. However, hopes for an agreement appeared to fade as the night progressed.

Time was critical because the bill could run afoul of post-closure delaying tactics and complicate efforts to wind up business of the 102nd Congress during the next couple of days.

The bill is important politically both because of the importance of tissue research to finding cures for a number of diseases and because it is attached to the National Institutes of Health reauthorization bill, which calls for a major new emphasis on research dealing with women's health problems. This is one reason why many lawmakers want to pass it before adjournment and why Republicans are eager to spare Bush any political problems that might result from a veto.

In other action, House-Senate conferees on the defense spending bill agreed to keep $210 million for breast cancer research, insisting it be counted in a way that would overcome administration objections to using military funds for such domestic initiatives.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who led the fight to add the breast cancer research money, said in a statement after the conference that he "stared the administration down on their budgetary rules and they blinked."

Another issue still hanging is legislation to break a nearly two-decade impasse over how much of Montana's six million acres of roadless National Forest land should be protected as wilderness. The House yesterday approved, 282 to 123, a measure that would create about 1.5 million acres of wilderness, release 3.5 million more acres to multiple use development such as logging and mining, and place the remainder under further study and in special management areas.

But that bill must be reconciled in a conference committee with a Senate version that protects less acreage and differs on other provisions.

Staff writer Guy Gugliotta contributed to this report.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.