SMALL GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVES HAVE REVOLTED against President Bush and the Republican leadership of the Senate and the House. Their goal, with hurricane recovery costs soaring, is what it’s always been: to hold down spending and restrain the growth of government. It is an impossible dream or close to impossible. The small government brigade is a distinct minority in Congress. Their strength is outside Congress. They reflect the anxiety of the Republican party’s base, conservatives and moderates both, over the uncontrolled spending and massive expansion of government following hurricane Katrina. “The base is killing us,” a Republican senator says.
There’s another source of strength for small government conservatives. One congressional Republican says an old adage of Newt Gingrich is applicable: Never assume that anybody is organized or there’s a grand plan that’s in effect. The president is concentrated on emergency relief and recovery in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Congress is in disarray. But small government conservatives do have a plan–actually two plans–for paying for a portion of the hurricane costs by offsetting spending cuts.
In the House, the conservative Republican Study Committee proposed “budget options” that would cut spending by as much as $102 billion in one year. The RSC scheme would delay the start of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, scheduled for January 1, for at least one year. Led by Republican representative Mike Pence of Indiana, RSC leaders met last week with Josh Bolten, the White House budget director, and with House Republican leaders, who rejected their plan as politically unrealistic, which it is.
In the Senate, six Republicans offered a series of “options to save spending by reducing non-defense spending growth.” By merely freezing discretionary spending–that means everything but entitlements–for a single year, $47.9 billion would be saved. Limiting the freeze to non-defense, non-homeland security spending would still save $36.2 billion, according to Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire. “If Congress simply put in place mechanisms to control the growth of discretionary spending at or near inflation, the two-year cost savings is well in excess of $20 billion,” Sununu says. Slowing the growth of spending in such ways is more realistic.
The resentment felt by the small government conservatives antedates Katrina and the current argument over spending on relief and recovery. They have a philosophical difference with the president and with their own leaders in Congress. They favor sharply limited government and minimal spending. Bush and his congressional allies prefer a more expansive role for government and worry less about increased spending. Bush has been called a big government conservative (by me), but that label is inapt because it implies he’s a liberal. He’s not, but neither is he a small government conservative.
A series of expensive measures championed by Bush and passed by Congress–the farm, highway, and energy bills, for instance–has caused the anger of small government conservatives to simmer. In the House, 25 Republicans voted against the Medicare drug benefit in 2003, nearly prompting its defeat and alienating the White House and party leaders in Congress. Nonetheless, most of the 25 remain proud of their “no” vote. Sununu voted against the Medicare, energy, highway, and farm bills. Yet he’s been skillful in maintaining his ties to the White House and Senate leaders.
The RSC’s Pence hasn’t been. Indeed, he is loathed by Bush aides and House Republican leaders. They blame him for going to the press with proposed spending cuts before coming to them, cuts they insist can’t get more than a few dozen votes. They claim he has set the bar so high for cuts that anything short of $100 billion, which Congress might actually approve, will appear puny. Perhaps, but the real effect of the RSC’s hype of spending restraint is that serious cuts (or “offsets”) are now far more likely.
Bush bears less blame for out-of-control spending than Congress itself. True, he’s never vetoed a spending bill. But he cajoled Congress into slashing the level of highway spending. And his budgets, aside from defense outlays, have called for gradual decreases in discretionary spending. His 2006 budget sought to hold all non-entitlement spending, including for defense and homeland security, to less than the rate of inflation. That, however, was pre-Katrina and pre-Rita.
The record of the congressional Republican leadership on curbing spending is abysmal. In response to the RSC, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay claimed all the fat in the federal budget had already been scraped away. That inflamed small government conservatives and even moderates, and DeLay was forced to retract his statement. When Bolten addressed Senate Republicans last week, he didn’t apologize for Bush’s insistence on financing the recovery of the Gulf Coast with billions of federal dollars. He pointed out that Republicans hadn’t adopted most of the cuts outlined by the White House in the 2006 budget. If Congress wants to cut more now, he told the senators, go to it.
Getting Republican leaders, much less the rest of Congress, to agree to spending cuts is an enormous task. Even some small government conservatives want to protect the “earmarks” for transportation projects in their districts. Nor is the White House ready to send a list of recommended cuts to Congress. Bush is still distracted by the immediate needs of the recovery. As usual, Democrats are no help. Their impulse is to raise taxes, just as it was before the hurricanes. Bush has wisely ruled out tax hikes.
Though few in number, the small government conservatives are a problem for Bush. His power as president is based partly on his ability to marshal huge Republican majorities in Congress along with a handful of Democratic renegades. If the RSC types–30 or more of them in the House and a half-dozen in the Senate–reject his hurricane recovery legislation, the Bush majority may vanish. White House aides profess not to be worried about the revolt of small government conservatives. But it’s a bigger threat than they imagine.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
