October 28, 1990

Meeting almost around the clock, Congress today approved the most important legislation ever written to reduce the budget deficit and prepared to adjourn, just 10 days before the mid-term elections. The House gave its final approval to the budget bill just before dawn by a vote of 228 to 200. The Senate adopted the measure late this afternoon, also by a narrow margin, 54 to 45. A majority of Republicans in both chambers voted against it, but Democratic support was strong enough to carry the day.

It's tough enough to have one house to sell these days. But America's largest companies are ending up with hundreds, as the stagnant real-estate market swells their inventories of houses they buy from employees they are relocating. E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, , which moves 4,000 employees a year, has watched its inventories double in Delaware and Pennsylvania in the last year, to 160 houses. To sell those houses without driving prices down further, Du Pont has adopted a program of incentives to lure home buyers, including low-interest mortgages and a chance to win prizes just by looking at a house.

Every afternoon at 3, Marie Covello waits for the van that brings her severely retarded 31-year-old son home from his day program. She takes John's hand to help him up the stairs of their Verona, N.J., house, pats his red hair into place, gives him a glass of water, reminds him to go to the bathroom and settles him in front of the television. And in the back of her mind, as in those of thousands of other aging parents of retarded children, Mrs. Covello, who is 73, wonders how long she and her 75-year-old husband, Vince, will be able to take care of Johnny -- and what will happen to him when they cannot.

AS if Long Island did not have enough of its own troubles, New York City's fiscal problems have become an issue on the Island, at least among Republican candidates for the State Senate and Assembly. The Republicans, trying to hold on to their last stronghold in Albany, the State Senate, and to beef up their thin minority in the Assembly, have seized on the city's problems to argue that Democratic legislators will try to give the state store away to the city and increase the income tax on commuters. It is the latest variation on a familar Republican theme over the years, and Democrats counter that it is a Republican effort to kick up dust around the Republican record on taxes, abortion, gun control and the environment and to divert attention from the erratic Republican gubernatorial candidate, Pierre A. Rinfret.

THE 101st Congress began its two-year tenure in January of 1989 with a simple but lofty goal: to govern. But as the weary and frustrated lawmakers struggled toward a close this weekend, days before the midterm elections, governing seemed almost beside the point. For some, the question was whether a bitterly divided legislative branch and a frantic White House could even function.