We’ll stipulate at the outset that the conventions governing received political opinion in Washington are unfair to congressional Republicans.
As a minority in 1994, they manage to block a handful of deeply unpopular Democratic initiatives like the Clinton health care scheme. For this achievement, Republicans are jeered as goats. An algae-bloom of reports about GOP-inspired legislative gridlock covers the newspapers. Professors of government warn television audiences about the anti-democratic exploitation of the Senate’s filibuster rules. “Republican obstructionism” enters the lexicon.
And two years later, when a Republican majority’s legislation is shot down or stalled by Democratic filibuster and veto threats, is there comparable anguish about the minority party’s power to spoil American progress? Don’t be silly. There are literally millions of stories from 1996 in the giant Nexis computer database of print and broadcast news sources. A search of those stories turns up the phrase “Democratic obstructionism” exactly . . . never. President Clinton’s claim that Senate Democrats “have not abused the filibuster in their minority position the way the Republicans did for two solid years in 1993 and 1994” raises not a single reporter’s eyebrow in the White House briefing room.
Even though that claim is unarguably false. The Republican 104th Congress of 1995-96 is by far the most filibuster-clotted in American history. During the entire, famously “gridlocked” 103rd, then-Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s Democrats sought to end debate against real or threatened Republican filibusters a total of 51 times. The current Republican Senate majority has already been forced into 71 similar “cloture petition” maneuvers — on 32 separate pieces of legislation. The balanced budget amendment, tort reform, regulatory reform, labor law reform, the farm bill, the 1996 budget appropriation for the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services: all of them filibustered by Democrats.
The list will grow longer. The 104th Congress still has half a year left to live. And legislative obstructionism is the Democratic party’s central political strategy heading into November’s election. No bill that campaigning Republicans might brag about will be allowed enactment this year. And the GOP will again take the blame for gridlock. Once a goat, always a goat.
That’s President Clinton’s hope, at least. “Republicans in Congress want to ruin these good, bipartisan bills by attaching to them bad proposals that shouldn’t be there in the first place,” the president says. “They want to load the bills up with poison pills, measures the Republicans are inserting in the legislation to make sure I will veto it, so they can pretend it’s not just the poison pill I’m against, but the bill itself.” This is a classically Clintonian double-reverse spin, mirror writing that must be read upside down and backwards to be properly understood. The truth is this: The president and his Hill allies are desperate to attach phony “poison pill” labels to relatively obscure provisions in almost every piece of pending congressional business. That way Democrats can pretend to give a damn about the “good, bipartisan bills” they’re busy killing — when all they really care about is preventing Republican legislative success.
Last fall, an overwhelming and bipartisan 345-79 majority in the House of Representatives approved legislation to consolidate and rationalize the federal government’s 150-odd job training programs, now spread like unmatched puzzle pieces over 15 different agencies. Similar legislation passed the Senate by a 95-2 vote. The White House — and all 50 state governors-warmly endorsed the idea.
But this year the job training initiative is suddenly “unacceptable” to the Democratic party. A conference committee of House and Senate negotiators has worked for months to reconcile differences between each chamber’s version of the bill. Republicans on that committee have made a series of small and highly technical concessions to pro-family critics of the measure like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Mrs. Schlafly is not mollified, and most Republican conferees seem prepared to proceed without her. But Democrats now have an excuse to denounce the entire enterprise as “extremist.” Ted Kennedy is threatening another filibuster. So count this bill a goner. And don’t expect the Democratic party to be charged with the crime. “Job Training Bill Trapped in a Philosophical Snare; Eagle Forum Targets Bipartisan Legislation,” the Washington Post announces.
The president and his pals have similarly low hopes for health insurance reform legislation, which not too long ago passed the Senate by a vote of 100- 0. Senator Kennedy is holding up this mild-mannered initiative as well, despite the fact that he himself co-authored it with Republican Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas. The House version, you see, includes a provision for tax- exempt medical savings accounts, an interesting experiment favored by conservative policy activists that Democrats ritually and hysterically decry as the greatest health threat to America since polio. Republicans must promise in advance that nothing remotely resembling the House-passed plan will appear in a final health care bill, Kennedy demands. Otherwise, he will refuse to appoint Democratic negotiators to the necessary House-Senate conference. There will be no health care bill at all. Which will help Democrats more than Republicans, top Kennedy health care staffer David Nexon candidly explains, “because we can credibly blame them for killing it.”
He means Democrats will be able to manipulate a credulous press corps into blaming Republicans for killing it. And you know what? He’s probably right. Political journalism is as dependent on complexityreducing stereotypes as any other story-telling medium. And the GOP as Villain of Gridlock is one of the hardest stereotypes there is. It no longer comports with reality. But no one hardly notices.
We’ll say it again: It’s unfair. And it’s also pointless for Republicans to complain about it. The last time a congressional party made its enemies’ ” obstructionism” a major campaign theme — remember the Democrats’ “Action, Not Gridlock” slogan in the fall of ’94? — the effort was a spectacular bust. Americans, as they should, still care more about the substance of partisan legislative debate than about the tricks each party uses to mess the other up. The country did not like the Democratic legislative agenda in 1994, and it rewarded the GOP for filibustering that agenda to death. In 1996, voters will not be much impressed by Republican grumping about Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy. They will demand something more from the congressional majority than that.
The real task for Hill Republicans remains essentially the same: to take the case for their thwarted conservative policies to the nation as a whole — and to broaden the appeal of those policies to Americans not yet convinced of their merits. Success will help produce what mere griping about minority obstructionism cannot: a Republican majority sufficiently large that no Democratic filibuster can touch it.
David Tell, for the Editors
