Such a proposal was part of a Republican-sponsored balanced-budget bill that President Clinton vetoed in 1995.

Using the tax-cutting and spending deal struck by President Clinton and Republican leaders as a blueprint, the House Budget Committee took the first legislative step today toward enactment of a balanced-budget bill.

But the measure was attached to the vetoed balanced-budget bill, making the savings-industry legislation the victim of a bigger and more politically charged dispute.

They're saying that the deficit has gone down more rapidly than it was predicted to go down when we signed --- when I signed the balanced-budget bill and when it passed back last summer.

His massive, three-year $103 billion transportation package would have breached the balanced-budget bill by at least $30 billion, only weeks after it was signed.

He told a news conference that the provisions Republicans had added to bills, from changes in Medicaid financing on a welfare measure to tax cuts in a balanced-budget bill, were "good medicine."

That group supported a balanced-budget bill with no tax cut that got 68 votes in the House.

The balanced-budget bill I signed yesterday sets up a bipartisan commission to reform Medicare.

"We've taken a tax-cut bill and made it a balanced-budget bill with a tax-cut component to it," Representative Michael N. Castle, a Delaware Republican, said in an interview.

A18 The balanced-budget bill faced an unsure fate in the House.