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By Juliet Eilperin and John F. Harris The resolution, passed on a 342 to 69 vote, marked the second day in a row that Clinton has suffered a rebuke in the House. It came as the administration was still dusting off from the thrashing it took on Wednesday when an overwhelming bipartisan majority chastised Clinton for failing to act in "the national interest" by allowing a U.S. aerospace firm to launch a satellite on a Chinese rocket and moved to strip his authority to approve such deals in the future. Even Democrats generally supportive of Clinton said yesterday that he and White House officials had brought some of the problems on themselves. "They need to be more cooperative," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who has defended Clinton repeatedly as ranking member on the Government Reform and Oversight Committee. White House officials yesterday acknowledged being caught flatfooted by Wednesday's votes, in which Democrats joined in what amounted to a Republican ambush on the administration's China policy a month before the president is to embark on a state visit to Beijing. But they vowed not to let Congress interfere with Clinton's foreign policy prerogatives. Clinton, aides said, hopes to quell the rapidly escalating controversy over the satellite launch by doing what his congressional critics said he has failed to do: divulge information. The White House today intends to send to the House documents that White House officials said will show there was nothing nefarious about Clinton's approval last February of a waiver to U.S. policy allowing Loral Space and Communications Ltd. to send a satellite into space atop a Chinese rocket. The Justice Department had urged Clinton not to approve the deal, citing concerns that it would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation of whether Loral and Hughes Electronics Corp. violated the law in sharing information with the Chinese after a failed 1996 missile launch. But Clinton went ahead anyway, and Republicans say he may have been influenced by the substantial Democratic contributions made by Loral's chief executive, Bernard Schwartz. The documents that will be delivered today to Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, will show that Clinton acted only after other parts of his government, such as the State and Defense departments, agreed that there was no threat to national security and that the action was consistent with precedents set years earlier, administration officials said. But yesterday's resolution urging cooperation with congressional investigators revealed a remarkable unwillingness by Democrats to extend the benefit of the doubt to the leader of their own party, at a time when he is battling scandal allegations on fronts from Whitewater to Monica S. Lewinsky to 1996 fund-raising. Many Democrats acknowledged the resolutions have little practical impact, but said they were an opportunity to neutralize Republican charges that House Democrats are helping Clinton block legitimate inquiries. "The votes didn't reflect any erosion in our support for the president's policies on constructive engagement [with China], boldly reforming education and protecting our children's health," said Rep. Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.). "What it does reflect is a concern that if there is something to investigate, we want to get to the bottom of that." Other Democrats, however, expressed more serious reservations about the recent charges that the White House may have awarded favorable treatment to Loral. "The issue of the China export license, technology transfers and foreign efforts to influence campaigns is the only serious question I've heard in this whole Whitewater-Lewinsky thing," said one senior Democrat. Clinton fared somewhat better among Democrats on a second resolution passed by the House yesterday calling on him to make public all legal papers involved in his fight to invoke executive privilege in the Lewinsky investigation. On that vote, 36 Democrats voted with Republicans. Senior administration officials said they were still trying to decipher the consequences of Wednesday's House votes, but expressed confidence that what they consider the most noxious of the House actions -- especially a vote to effectively remove Clinton's authority to let U.S. firms launch satellites atop Chinese rockets -- will never become law. In addition, officials fear the House's plan to give Congress more oversight over commerce in nuclear energy technology could be a serious burden. The officials dismissed other resolutions as merely expressions of disapproval over the Loral decision, or essentially redundant calls on Clinton not to make technology transfers that already are barred by law or the administration's own procedures. Dismissing the House action as a jittery and uninformed reaction to recent news reports, Clinton aides predicted the Senate would act in a more deliberative fashion. The Senate has not yet decided whether it will adopt similar measures, and an aide to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said it was unlikely that the chamber would take up the matter before the Memorial Day recess. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), who held a hearing yesterday on the problem of technology transfers, said he had asked Lott to consider voting on the issue today. "We should express the sense of the Senate that any further licenses or waivers for exporting satellite business to China should be suspended," Cochran said. But Cochran stopped short of proposing that the Senate suggest a binding measure similar to the one passed by the House Wednesday, which effectively banned all exports and re-exports of satellites to China. White House press secretary Michael McCurry acknowledged that the administration needed to do a better job of explaining its policies regarding technology exports to China. But he also asserted that many lawmakers scarcely understood what they were voting on. "I think that they reacted in the heat of the moment to a lot of newspaper headlines without stopping and learning more about the transactions, learning more about the facts," he said. "I think for good reason we don't have 535 secretaries of state; we have but one." Many in the business community, meanwhile, said they were as blindsided as the administration was by Wednesday's House votes, and that they, too, regard the attempt to dictate technology export policy as precipitous and ill-advised. Lobbyists involved in aerospace issues predicted a major effort to overturn the votes. "The House of Representatives had a hissy fit," said Willard Workman, a vice president handling international issues for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "This is not the substance of sound public policy or good foreign policy." "This slew of amendments -- some of us found out about them but it was too late to do anything about them," Workman said. The technology controversy is only one factor clouding Clinton's China trip. On Wednesday, critics from a broad ideological spectrum -- from Christian conservative Gary Bauer to human rights activist Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, who is married to Clinton's housing secretary -- urged the president not to be received in Tiananmen Square, site of China's bloody 1989 crackdown on dissidents. McCurry had said that Clinton being welcomed in Tiananmen was protocol, the equivalent of foreign leaders being welcomed on the South Lawn of the White House. "I wonder if Mr. McCurry can tell us how many American citizens have been gunned down or run over by tanks on the South Lawn of the White House," Bauer complained yesterday.
Staff writers Ceci Connolly, Helen Dewar, Walter Pincus and Tim Smart contributed to this report.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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