Budget Battle Turns Personal:

Tensions between Congress and the White House over the president’s budget exploded into the open yesterday when a debate over congressional prerogatives turned into an unusually bitter and personal exchange involving two of Washington’s most powerful figures: Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill.

The spat rocked an otherwise routine Senate Budget Committee hearing, where the normal dance of senatorial courtesy — and polite groveling by administration witnesses — suddenly vanished. O’Neill, telling Byrd he wouldn’t “cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch,” struggled with his emotions by taking deep breaths.

Byrd, 84, chairs the Appropriations Committee and is arguably the fiercest defender of Congress’s interests. He spent 15 minutes berating O’Neill, a blunt former corporate executive, for a speech O’Neill made last year asserting that congressional rules “created by just ordinary people” are “like the Lilliputians tying us to the ground.”

Byrd noted that the administration’s glossy new budget document includes a cartoon of Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians. He denounced the cartoon — one of several illustrations of White House sentiments and criticisms — as “nonsense” that belittled how Congress represents the interests of Americans.

Since Monday’s release of the president’s budget plan, which vividly poked fun at alleged congressional pork, lawmakers from both parties have bristled at the administration’s rhetoric. Washington Post