Party Lines Getting Tangled Amid Crime Bill Haggling : Politics: The final debate takes on a contrarian quality. Republicans are backing positions once championed by Democrats.

WASHINGTON — No one expects consistency in politics, but the last round of debate over the $33.2-billion crime bill is beginning to resemble a hall of mirrors. On two key provisions, Republican leaders are attacking the final legislation with arguments that the Administration itself once raised--and criticizing language other Republicans helped to write into the bill.

The Republican accusations that the legislation does not offer enough community protection against sexual offenders substantially echoes concerns that the Administration itself voiced months ago. And the provisions under attack from Republican leaders for potentially releasing convicted drug offenders from jail were drafted with the support of leading Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee--over the Administration’s objections.

In both cases, the Administration, in effect, is now under pressure from the GOP to adopt positions close to its own original preferences in the bill. But steering the legislation in that direction, on either front, risks angering liberals who rejected the Administration’s positions in the first place.

Moreover, on both counts, the Administration views the Republican objections as exaggerating the impact of the disputed provisions: “The bigger flaw is that there are mountains being made of these molehills,” said one senior Justice Department official.

Even so, the Administration is willing to satisfy the GOP critics on at least the so-called “sexual predator” provisions. Rep. Dick Zimmer (R-N.J.) said Tuesday night that President Clinton had called to tell him the Administration would accept the changes in the measure that Republicans are seeking.

On the House floor Thursday, Republicans argued that the final legislation undermined efforts to encourage community notification when a sexual offender moves into a neighborhood after release from prison.

This emotional dispute revolves around the way the House-Senate conference committee blended two bills that aimed to encourage states to track individuals with records of sexual offenses or crimes against children.

The first bill--the so-called “Jacob Wetterling Act” sponsored by Minnesota GOP Rep. Jim Ramstad and GOP Sen. Dave Durenberger--encouraged states to establish a registry to keep track of individuals with a record of crimes against children; both houses approved that measure. Last fall the Senate also passed an amendment to the crime bill from Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) that established a second registry for offenders convicted of sex crimes against victims of any age.

The House-Senate conferees decided that it made no sense to establish two registries for such offenders, instead creating one larger registry covering both groups of offenders.

But in combining the bills, the conferees took provisions from the Republican-sponsored “Jacob Wetterling Act” in two key instances that were more narrow than the broader requirements established under the Gorton legislation. It is those provisions from the Gorton amendment that Republicans are now clamoring to include in the final bill.

In the Gorton bill, a so-called “sexual predator” would be required to notify law enforcement officials of his address every three months for the rest of his life. The conferees had accepted the Wetterling provision that required only annual notification for 10 years.

More important to the critics, the conferees rejected language in the Gorton amendment to guide the release of information to communities about sexual offenders obtained for the new state registries.

As is often the case in polarizing Washington battles, the dispute boils down to an interpretation of a few words: The Gorton bill says that information can be released to “protect the public;” the final bill (drawing on language in the Wetterling bill) says that it can be released only for “law enforcement purposes.”

Critics of the final bill maintain that there is a large difference. The standard of protecting the public would encourage officials to widely distribute information to a community where a sexual offender has located, while the standard in the final bill might impede such efforts, they maintain.

In fact, Administration and congressional sources said, Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose) and other House liberals did intend to narrow the Gorton provision’s scope, fearing that it would lead to incidents like the recent case in Washington state, where a sex offender whose release was made public under that state’s disclosure law had his home burned down in the Seattle suburbs.

At the time, the Administration took a position not unlike the one GOP critics are taking now. In its formal comments to the conference committee in June, the Administration expressed concern that the privacy provisions in the bills might interfere with state programs to disseminate information about sex offenders to “school authorities or victims of earlier offenses.”

Even so, Administration officials said they doubt that the final bill represents as substantial a change from the Gorton version as Republicans contend. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has concluded, they noted, that the “law enforcement purposes” standard in the final legislation would not impede existing community notification programs in the states.

The struggle over mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders has an equally convoluted history.

House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia has repeatedly condemned the conference bill’s provision that could lead to freeing low-level, nonviolent drug offenders without serious prior records from lengthy mandatory minimum prison sentences.

“It would release over 10,000 drug dealers who are currently in prison,” Gingrich said recently. “We are prepared to go to the country and say: ‘Releasing 10,000 drug dealers is not anti-crime.’ ”

But two of Gingrich’s fellow House Republicans, conservatives Bill McCollum of Florida and Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, voted for making retroactive the drug offender release provision that Gingrich condemns. On the other hand, the Administration opposed this feature, arguing instead that it should apply only to those who violate drug laws after the bill is enacted.

Even so, the Administration does not believe that the provision would have nearly the impact Gingrich suggests. Based on federal prison statistics, the Justice Department estimates that between 100 and 535 prisoners could win immediate release. By 1999, the number would be between 2,000 and 3,000.

The notion of softening punishment of nonviolent, minor drug offenders emerged as a compromise to proposals in the House to eliminate mandatory-minimum sentences entirely on grounds that they were using up scarce prison space needed for more serious and violent lawbreakers and keeping lesser criminals behind bars for longer than they deserved.

After hearings on mandatory minimums by the House Judiciary crime subcommittee headed by Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a middle ground won bipartisan support: Low-level offenders serving a mandatory minimum could ask a court to be released, citing such factors as no prior serious criminal record, or no firearm or violence involved in the crime.

Over Administration objections, however, the conference bill adopted the retroactive provision and Gingrich had a powerful one-liner about freeing 10,000 drug dealers. Yet, said a senior White House official, Republicans appear less interested in the issue off-camera: “It has not come up in our meetings,” the official said.