ON NOVEMBER 9, THE SENATE considered linking the abolition of the Commerce Department to a debt-limit extension soon to be sent to the White House. A whip count showed that 14 GOP senators would oppose the measure, ensuring its defeat. This infuriated a group of House GOP freshmen, who marched over to lobby senators. The off-beat ploy not only failed (Republican senators had never warmed to the idea of abolishing Commerce), it also fomented the very disarray that Speaker Newt Gingrich had been lecturing his House colleagues to avoid. Then in private, Gingrich himself slipped: At a leadership meeting on November 13, he complained that senators didn’t want the government to close because their visiting constituents wouldn’t be able to go into the Washington Monument. Denny Hastert, a deputy House Republican whip, was less discreet. He told the IVall Street Journal, “The Republican senators are irresponsible. They’ve got their heads in the sand.” Meanwhile, conservative Republican staffers were privately blaming obstinate House GOP freshmen for the party being “off message.” The divisions persist below the surface, but the infighting subsided as Republicans coalesced around one idea. On November 16, they announced that they would send the president a continuing resolution with a single condition: that Clinton agree to balance the budget over seven years using Congressional Budget Office assumptions. The beauty of this simple resolution, Republicans reasoned, was that the promised veto could mean only one thing: Bill Clinton wants to keep government big, while Republicans want to shrink it. By the end of the week, any talk of GOP compromise on the seven years was heresy. Republicans had recognized what should have been self-evident a week earlier: As Sen. John McCain put it, “If we can keep the debate focused on a balanced budget, we’re going to win.”
That focus was decided at the morning meeting of the Speaker’s Administrative Group on November 13. Gingrich, House majority leader Dick Armey, House whip Tom Delay, and Gingrich loyalists Bill Paxon, Bob Walker, and Hasterr, were there, as well as senior Senate aides Kyle McSlarrow and Dave Hoppe. They could see that Republicans were getting slaughtered by the White House for linking government funding to an increase in Medicare premiums. They needed to streamline their message. The group agreed to drop all extraneous issues and mobilize around the clean, simple theme of balancing the budget in seven years. Missionary work followed, with staffers fanning out to convey the new theme, and by November 14 nearly every House and Senate Republican had embraced it.
GOP solidarity further crystallized after a presidential speech on November 14. That morning, Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. John Kasich, representing Congress, and Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and Budget Director Alice Rivlin, from the White House, met on the sixth floor of the Dirksen building. Some GOP senators feared that Domenici might repeat his performance from the 1990 budget summit, where he advocated tax hikes. The meeting modestly narrowed the differences between the two sides and was mostly good-natured (at one point, Domenici jokingly referred to Clinton as “the Big Potato”). The two sides agreed not to demagogue to the media, and Domenici and Panetta kept the bargain, appearing together at a press conference and describing their efforts as productive.
The goodwill, and any chance of a pre-emptive surrender by Domenici, evaporated a few hours later. Clinton’s speech blamed Congress for the government shutdown and excoriated Republicans for “sharp hikes in Medicare premiums and deep cuts in education and the environment.” In the five-minute address, he managed to repeat this line of attack seven more times. “That speech brought home the depth of the problem,” said a Senate aide, who described Clinton’s rhetoric as “mendacious.” Domenici captured the mood change in an uncharacteristically livid statement shortly after the president spoke: “You stand before the American people and fill the airwaves with half- truths, absolute statements that are inconsistent with anything that anybody else is saying.” When Domenici, Kasich, Panetta, and Rivlin met that evening in the Capitol, no progress was made and no joint press conference was held. The stalemate precluded meetings between the administration and Congress for the next two days. But the speech also unified Republicans. “I think every time President Clinton opens his mouth it brings Republicans together,” says Hastert.
Yet GOP strategic unity did not resolve lesser legislative disputes. Republicans outside the leadership spent much of the week ironing out their many differences on appropriations bills. With the government shut down, others didn’t have a lot to do. “I was answering mail this morning,” said Mississippi senator Thad Cochran at midweek. Cochran’s modesty obscures the serious effort he was making to rally his colleagues: Instead of getting bogged down in fights over stopgap spending measures, Republicans should be striving to complete their appropriations work (only four of 13 appropriations bills had been enacted). Cochran told me, Republicans “run the risk of spreading our net so wide that our achievement [balancing the budget] will not be clearly appreciated.” By the end of the week, the appropriations bills were still unfinished, but the bigger news was that the apocalyptic scenarios predicted by the White House hadn’t come true. Default was not an immediate threat, and the markets were humming (the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 50 points on the second day the government was closed, and bond yields held steady). The GOP’s arguments about the need for smaller government were unexpectedly bolstered by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which announced that 99 percent of the workers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and 89 percent of those at the Department of Education, were non-essential. It didn’t hurt to have both Jay Leno and David Letterman joke about the shutdown being no big deal.
And, while Republicans were taking a drubbing in the polls (a November 14 CNN/USA Today poll found the GOP blamed for the shutdown by a 49-26 margin), they were still expecting their single-minded focus to pay off. “We figure there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” said Hastert, who by the middle of the week was sounding much more conciliatory toward the Senate. Smart move.
by Matthew Rees
