Republicans are negotiating on terms for nearly $800 billion in cuts over the next ten years, so that they can pass it and shelve it. That way, President Clinton's certain veto won't happen while Congress is on vacation and he has the stage to himself.

Away from Washington, all this play acting doesn't make sense to people who wonder why Congress and the White House aren't seeking terms on which they can agree rather than collide.

But in an arena bound by politics and long-rehearsed arguments about tax rates and government spending, it sounds sensible, at least to the debaters.

They've been around the tax track before. In prior rounds over the past five years, Clinton has used vetoes and the threat of them to push his budget terms, to his and Democratic advantage. He is proposing smaller tax cuts and reducing the US national debt.

It is an article of Republican faith that when the party campaigns for tax cuts, it wins elections, that the money ought to go back to taxpayers and not into the hands of Washington bureaucrats who think they know better how to spend it.

That essentially sums up the endless hours of speechmaking on tax cuts and government priorities.

Republican Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas says the real argument has more to do with federal spending than with cutting taxes. That sounds a lot like one of the rationales of Ronald Reagan's tax cutting economic policy nearly 20 years ago, which was that if the government didn't get the money, it couldn't spend it on programmes his Republican administration wanted to undo anyhow.

Gramm said the Republicans and the White House are "much further apart than the public understands''. Perhaps, but people do understand that the Republican Congress is going to pass something, Clinton is going to veto it, and both sides are going to argue that they were right. At least people who are paying attention to the whole business.

At issue now are House and Senate bills for ten-year tax cuts, totaling $792 billion in each version, but with differing provisions on what would be cut.

One feature of both measures: Neither would cut taxes until the year after next. About 80 percent of the projected cuts wouldn't happen until after 2004.

Republican leaders are trying to blend those bills into one they can get approved by the House by today or tomorrow, and the Senate on Friday, before Congress breaks for summer.

That final version would be set aside until after Labour Day, then sent to Clinton, who said he will veto it. The Republicans can't muster the two-thirds votes it would take to override him. But they could spend the recess telling voters about their tax cut bill.

Clinton has proposed $250 billion worth of tax cuts over ten years, for retirement savings, education tax breaks and other aims. The administration is willing to negotiate up a bit, but not to anything approaching the Republican measures.

So the lines are set. Neither side can win outright. Neither side can afford to surrender. -- AP