IN 1994, TERM LIMITS for U.S. senators and congressmen were a prominent item in the Contract With America. Republicans, worried they couldn’t get the needed two-thirds of Congress to enact the limits, promised only to bring the issue to a vote. But many were enthusiastic backers of limits that would, as the Contract put it, “replace career politicians with citizen legislators.” In 2000, term limits were stripped from the GOP platform adopted at the Republican convention in Philadelphia. Not only that, but the most ostentatious Republican supporter in 1994 of limiting House members to three 2-year terms, Rep. George Nethercutt of Washington, is now running for a fourth term.
The scuttling of term limits, at least at the congressional level, is one of a handful of alterations made to the GOP agenda to bring it in line with George W. Bush’s effort to be a “different kind of Republican” and a “compassionate conservative.” Some issues, like sharp curbs on immigration, have been dropped because both Bush and GOP leaders see them as politically harmful. Others, such as abandoning the fight to eliminate the Department of Education, have been imposed on the party by Bush. Still other Republican initiatives have simply run out of gas or were never seriously pushed. Among these is the drive to reduce the progressive impact of the federal tax code. The tax cut proposed by Bush and hailed almost universally by Republicans actually makes the code more progressive.
It’s not that the guts have been removed from Republicanism. The Bush GOP has preserved core conservative issues: reducing tax rates, building up the military, deploying a missile defense system, reforming Social Security with partial privatization, providing school vouchers, promoting faith-based antipoverty programs. But the modifications are significant. And what’s surprising is how readily most of the changes were accepted by both delegates at the Republican convention and members of the platform committee.
Affirmative action has long been fought by conservative Republicans as a cover for racial quotas and preferences. Republican leaders in Congress, however, have declined to bring anti-affirmative action legislation to a vote. And the GOP convention has moved the party further. From now on, “an attack on affirmative action would be unlikely and probably unwelcome,” says a Bush aide. Delegates, most of them conservatives, cheered loudly when affirmative action was defended by Colin Powell. This thrilled the Bush camp, which would rather leave the whole issue to the courts.
Bush himself is against quotas and preferences, but favors his own version of affirmative action. When a quota plan for admissions to the University of Texas was struck down, he backed what he calls “affirmative access,” which makes the top 10 percent of every high school class eligible to attend UT. He’s also pushed for predominantly black and Hispanic schools to offer advanced placement courses. This year, his aides boast about how diverse the Republican ticket in Texas is. It includes a white male running for president, a woman for U.S. Senate (Kay Bailey Hutchison), a black male for Railroad Commissioner (Michael Williams), and a Hispanic man (Albert Gonzales) for the state supreme court. “We’ve got a ticket in which white males are the minority,” says Bush strategist Karl Rove.
On immigration, Bush has taken the final step away from Republican attempts to restrict immigration, attempts now seen as misbegotten. “He has a far more pro-immigrant policy than the party has had,” says a Bush adviser. In 1994, Bush opposed California’s Proposition 187, which barred government services for illegal aliens. Now many Republicans believe 187, which passed only to be overruled in court, was a huge political mistake, alienating Hispanic voters. “The shrapnel from that is still embedded in the corpus of the California Republican party,” the adviser adds. Bush also has jettisoned the party’s opposition to bilingual education and endorsement of English-only laws. He favors bilingualism so long as English is learned by every student.
In Philadelphia, Bush encountered trouble on only one front, his plan to abandon the battle to kill the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts. The education subcommittee of the platform committee threw out Bush education items because they implied a large federal role. The Bush camp then successfully pressured the full committee to put the Bush platform.
“This was the one case where we actually went to some effort to reverse what would have been the instincts of the group,” according to a Bush aide. A plank calling for elimination of the Education Department was defeated on a voice vote. As for the NEA, “nobody was pushing to kill it,” the aide says. Certainly the Bush campaign isn’t.
Some of the changes have been subtle. Bush has moved the party beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act, which many conservatives oppose. The GOP platform calls for mini-initiatives to finance access for the disabled in places such as churches which the ADA doesn’t cover. On gays, the Bush GOP has adopted “don’t ask, don’t tell” — the Clinton administration policy — as its approach to military service for homosexuals. The platform says homosexuality and military service are “fundamentally incompatible,” but Bush pointedly does not repeat that sentiment. On taxes, the party has lurched further away from a flat tax, which not long ago was widely praised by Republicans.
The docility of Republicans in agreeing to drop once-popular issues was especially evident on term limits. “The party isn’t against term limits,” an aide says. “It’s just that nobody cares.” Except for Bush, and he wanted no mention of term limits in the platform. “Term limits is not our fight,” says Rove. “Bush doesn’t feel we need them in Texas.” And term limits for Congress is “not central to our program,” Rove adds. So term limits simply vanished as a GOP issue, and with scarcely a peep of dissent.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and co-host of the Fox News Channel’s nightly special edition of The Beltway Boys at the Democratic National Convention.