THE CASE FOR A NEW ‘Do-NOTHING’ CONGRESS

Still, if “revolutionary change” means less in the United States than it does elsewhere, it continues to mean something — at the least, a substantial and permanent change of direction in public policy. One-third of the way through the Republican congressional majority’s mandate, a revolution in that sense has yet to arrive.

Perhaps the word “revolution” is itself part of the problem. Another Republican “revolution” was proclaimed 15 years ago — the Reagan evolution — and its efforts to alter the fundamental nature of Big Government were ultimately unavailing. In fact, the most successful Republican Congress of the modern era was the 80th — the one derided by Harry Truman as the “Do- Nothing Congress.” What Harry Truman defined as “nothing” would now be revolution enough, far more like revolution than anything yet o emerge from the 104th Congress.

Certainly, the Republicans have enacted important reforms and courageously voted for large cuts in federal expenditures. The reductions in congressional staffs, the ban on proxy voting in” committees, term limits for committee chairman — these reforms, resisted for decades by a Democratic leadership richly meriting Gingrich’s abuse of it as “corrupt,” are pumping some of the bilge water out of the ship of state.

The House’s attack on federal over-regulation like-wise represents real change. So does the willingness to be held to account by the electorate on the items of the Contract with America — regardless of the actual merit of those items. So, finally, do the eleven appropriations bills thus far voted out of the House, which collectively contain spending cuts that average 4.4 percent.

But while real, the changes effected by the new Republican majority are also sharply limited. Remember, it isn’t the federal budget as a whole that’s being cut by 4.4 percent, but only the limited portions of it that must still go through the old appropriations procedure. Not only Social Security, but Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, and all other entitlements programs will be left unscathed by this round of budget work. Even within the discretionary portion of the budget, grotesque boondoggies that out-of-power conservatives howled against for years escaped the Republican budget-drafters unscathed. Retired Rep. Tim Penny, co-author of the abortive Penny-Kasich budget cut plan in the 103rd Congress, ticks off some of the most egregious examples: the Legal Services Corporation and the Maritime Administration, impact aid to school districts with large numbers of federal employees and the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Every passing week, another increment of enthusiasm seems to leak out of the House Republicans. Talk of abolishing the Energy, Education, Labor, and Commerce departments has subsided. So have hopes for an attack on corporate subsidies: Of the $40 billion in cuts proposed by Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich — $15 billion worth of cuts in grants to business and the elimination of $25 billion worth of favors to specific firms and industries secreted in the tax code — only $1.5 billion emerged from the House Appropriations Committee. And don’t pin all the blame on the old fossils who chair these committees: One of the most passionate defenders of the Energy Department, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Economic Development Administration, and the Appalachian Regional Commission has been Zach Wamp, a hot-blooded freshman populist from eastern Tennessee.

The hardihood of business subsidies casts an unflattering light on the House’s huge reductions in spending on regulatory activities disliked by employers: 30 percent out of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement budget, 40 percent out of the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement budget. A House that cuts OSHA but won’t cut the Export-Import Bank lends plausibility to the jibe that the Republican Party is animated less by passion for limited government than by a subservience to the wishes of corporate America.

Indeed, on the one important vote where market principles and business interests collided, the House emphatically put business first: The Contract with America’s pledge to defend property rights against regulatory takings was distorted by a last-minute amendment that defined federal water subsidies as a form of “property.” The business interests that dominate the great spending committees — Agriculture, Transportation — have already learned to pay their protection money to Republicans rather than Democrats, and the well-rewarded House committee chairmen of the 104th Congress in return are transfusing cash from the taxpayers to favored industries and firms almost as enthusiastically as the committee chairmen of the 103rd.

As for the Senate — well, there the news is nearly all bad. Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy at the Cato Institute and the editor of the House Republicans’ latest manifesto, “Restoring the Dream,” complains, “It’s as if George Mitchell till ran the place.”

Republican optimists argue that the real revolution remains “one election away” — that true reform will not come to American government until after the election of a Republican president and the strengthening of the Republican congressional majority in 1996.

There’s a lot to that: Big budget cuts, the redesign of vast programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the reconceiving of welfare probably cannot be accomplished without presidential salesmanship. But the optimistic view contains one fatal weakness: Which of the Republican presidential candidates is going to fight that fight? The most probable nominee, Robert Dole, has shown himself indifferent to — actually mystified by — serious conservatism throughout his career. The Republican revolution may indeed require one more election; unfortunately, the election required is not the one likely to occur in 1996.

And it’s equally plausible — perhaps more so — that the optimists are wrong. Just as the strongly liberal Congresses elected in 1974, 1964, and 1932 did most of their damage in their first two years, so the Republican majority elected in 1994 may never be stronger than it is in 1995-96. Which means, that just as we are all urged to live our lives as if we could be summoned tomorrow to meet our Maker, so the Republicans would be wise to proceed as if all they will achieve for a decade will have been achieved by January 1997.

If anything, precedent suggests that conservative Congresses ought to proceed with even greater haste than liberal ones. Twice before in the postwar era, zealous conservative Congresses have stormed Washington, determined to redirect American government. The first brought in the “Do-Nothing Congress,” which took the oath of office in 1947. The second was the 97th Congress, seated in 1981. Both were exhausted within two years: the Republicans who won the House in November 1946 were swept out again by Harry Truman’s surprise reelection, while the Republican-conservative Democrat coalition of 1980 was shattered by the loss of northeastern GOP seats in the recession year 1982.

But one of those Congresses, that of 1947-48, at least left behind a roster of enduring achievements; the other, that of 1981-82, saw its work erased as soon as it left town. The Republicans of the 104th Congress might want to recall the reasons for the robustness of one legislative record and the evanescence of the other.

Truman may have denounced it, but under the informal but undisputed leadership of Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican House and Senate majority of 1946-48 did the following. It enacted the Taft-Hartley amendments to the Wagner Act, quashing New Deal hopes that America would become a union-dominated polity in the way that Britain, Italy, and West Germany did.

It forced the repeal of wartime price controls on food and other consumer products. It put a (temporary) stop to the draft. It slashed military spending. It cut taxes. It scrapped FDR’s wartime food-stamp program. It closed down Eleanor Roosevelt’s experiments with federally supported day care. It limited Washington’s role in the middle-class housing market to financing rather than (as liberals then wanted) construction and management, too.

Perhaps most important, it rejected one after another of President Truman’s projects for extending the ambit of Big Government: above all, his hopes to create an American version of Britain’s new National Health Service.

Not all these victories proved permanent, of course. But even in retrospect, the 20-year respite from activist government won by the 80th Congress amounted to more than merely a holding action. For liberals, the postwar years represented the best — perhaps the only — opportunity for the construction of a European-style social democracy in the United States. Thanks to Taft and his Republicans, that opportunity was lost.

The legacy of the 1980 Congress has, sadly, proven far less durable. Not for lack of ambition: in 1981, the 97th Congress gathered the courage to vote $64 billion in domestic spending cuts, the largest round of expenditure reductions since the Eisenhower era. It merged three separate tax cuts — the Kemp-Roth reductions in marginal tax rates, the indexing of tax brackets to inflation, and a business wish listrain a gigantic reduction in government’s demands upon the citizenry.

Not much of that work remains. The business tax cut was substantially retracted in 1982, Social Security payroll taxes were hiked in 1983, the tax on capital gains was hoisted up to 28 percent as part of the 1986 tax reform, and the income tax rates lowered in 1986 were pulled back up in 1990 and again in 1993. As for the spending cuts, they dissipated even faster. The U.S. spent about $5 billion on housing programs in 1983. The government spent less in 1984 than it had in 1983, less in 1985 than in 1984, less in 1986 than in 1985, less in 1987 than it had in 1986. Then, suddenly, all gains evaporated: Between 1987 and 1988, housing spending nearly sextupled, to $14 billion. By 1990, the federal government was spending more than $25 billion on housing programs. Housing is an unusually dramatic example, but in area after area of domestic discretionary spending, the restraint imposed in 1981 disappeared after 1986, and sometimes sooner.

What made the difference? The 1980 Congress contented itself with trimming, limiting, and containing existing programs. Between 1980 and 1988, only two federal programs were eliminated — revenue sharing with the states and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. The latter was promptly replaced by a new training program led through the Senate by future Vice President Quayle.

The 1946 Congress, though it left much of the New Deal alone, struck decisively when it moved at all.

Price controls were not lifted gradually; they were abolished outright. The closed shop was not tampered with; it was prohibited. The formula for eligibility requirements for food stamps was not made more stringent; food stamps themselves were junked. Texans joke that it’s useless to chop mesquite down with an ax; it will just grow back the next day. You have to blast it out of the ground with dynamite. The same holds true for federal spending programs. Leave even a smidgen of root in the soil, and within a year or two it will have regained its old size, plus some.

So far, the 1994 Congress has followed the example of 1980 rather than that of 1946. Even programs that rank at the top of its “must eliminate” list, like the National Endowment for the Arts, are not scheduled to disappear until after the next election. That’s a fair guarantee of their ultimate survival. Other programs will absorb budget cuts that can swiftly be reversed if political fashions change. Future Congresses will also find it easy to circumvent the Republicans’ major regulatory changes — the restrictions on unfunded mandates upon states and the stricter protection of private property rights — with technical-sounding procedural changes unlikely to excite much public indignation.

It’s possible that more substantial achievements are still to come. If welfare is transformed into a block grant and handed over to the states, that would represent a reform as dramatic as anything that happened in the 1940s. If the Republicans redesign Medicare to bring its convulsively growing costs under control, that too would represent reform. But the portents are not especially favorable in either case. Especially not for Medicare. It is increasingly apparent that the complexities of reform — and its political risks — are fiummoxing Republicans. “Restoring the Dream” strikes a distinctly nervous note whenever the topic comes up:

 

Given the sheer magnitude of Medicare’s financing shortfall, bipartisan cooperation is essential to establish needed, lasting reforms to keep the promise of Medicare to future generations … We must begin to put Medicare on a sound financial footing, and we ought to do this on a bipartisan basis … [We will] solicit broad participation from a variety of experts and the public .. .. There must be a dialogue that permits as much participation by the public as possible. By the end of the entire process, we will propose the changes necessary to preserve Medicare’s solvency.

I doubt that’s how Senator Taft talked when he was drafting Taft-Hartley.

Today’s Republicans believe that the best guarantor of the irreversibility of their reforms is a political one: their confidence that the 1994 election signals the long-delayed arrival of the often-sighted permanent Republican majority. Because they trust that the electorate will not soon turn against them, they are not bothering to cast their new policies in ways that will be difficult to repeal. The possibility that today’s cutback will regenerate under some future liberal majority seems to them far-fetched. That’s quite a gamble. Even if the Republicans do hold the House of Representatives indefinitely, there’s no certainty that the conservative faction within the Republican party will retain the upper hand — and no certainty that ” conservatism” in the next century will go on defining itself as necessarily opposing expensive government.

In the 1996 polls, Pat Buchanan is again demonstrating what he demonstrated in 1992: the potential appeal of a free-spending, nationalistic conservatism entirely different from the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan. Who can predict confidently that Buchanan-style conservatism will not soon carry far greater weight within the GOP?

More ominously, by betting tile permanence of the 1995-96 reforms on the electorate’s remaining in a conservative mood, the Republican majority is hobbling itself. If the legacy of the 104th Congress will evaporate the moment the Republicans lose power, Republicans will quickly — and not unreasonably — come to regard holding onto power as the most urgent of all their responsibilities.

Unfortunately, the surest way for conservatives to hold onto power indefinitely is to delete from the definition of “conservatism” anything that might conceivably prove unpopular. A populist party will seldom long remain a principled party.

The achievements of the 104th Congress as yet appear both incomplete and disturbingly fragile. For all the excitement and commotion of the past nine months, the real work still lies ahead.