Democrats insist, Republicans privately acknowledge, and the newspapers generally agree that the GOP’s 104th Congress ends in disappointment. But none of them can convincingly explain precisely how or why.
Is it, as the New York Times editorial page suggests, a matter of procedural failure? “Much of what the radicals promised in the Contract With America,” the paper of record casually announces, “did not get done.” But it did. House majority leader Dick Armey claims his party has, by some accounting, accomplished “65 percent” of its ten-point program. Be that as it may. In bulk terms, at least, much of the contract truly is law.
A welfare reform matched for significance and promise by only a handful of legislative initiatives in this century. The line-item veto. A crime-control measure. Adoption incentives and child-support enforcement provisions. A ban on unfunded federal mandates to the states. And an end to Congress’s exemption from the edicts it imposes on others.
All of them items in the contract. And all of them signed by the president. So the 104th has not been a Congress of “unproductive gridlock” like its Democratic predecessor, which dosed in 1994 in abject chaos, voteless on most major leadership goals.
Nor is it entirely fair to complain, as so many complainers now do, especially on the right, that the past two years of congressional Gingrichism have proved a failure of ambition. It’s true. We were promised a “revolution.” But that was always an unfortunate choice of words, in our view. A congressional majority without sufficient votes to override vetoes cannot, of course, achieve a real revolution against presidential opposition. And ” revolution” makes a poor fit with the mood and purpose of political conservatism, in any case.
Still, if Speaker Gingrich’s grandiloquent promise of revolution was meant simply to imply the major advancement of that conservatism, he has delivered in spades. The 104th Congress has begun the long overdue, market-based reform of the nation’s ludicrous farm price-support system. It has passed a deregulatory telecommunications law, the first in more than 30 years. It has reduced federal spending on domestic discretionary programs below levels that existed when Democrats controlled the purse.
And this Congress has advanced the conservative agenda in a number of important instances that did not result in a new law. In this session, Republicans have once again blocked an assault on constitutional speech rights masquerading as campaign finance reform. They have conducted a loud and serious debate about partial-birth abortion, an argument that has for the first time in living memory actually raised sufficient doubts about the morality of the nation’s pro-choice regime to change some people’s minds on the subject.
All in all, an impressive ideological — even political — triumph. Limited government, modern conservatism’s cri de coeur, is for the first time in 60 years a winning argument. President Clinton refuses to dispute it, which is probably the most important reason he seems so likely to win a smashing reelection victory a few weeks from now. Even those Democrats who would unseat conservatism’s congressional avatars refuse to dispute its accomplishments. Tom Daschle, the would-be Democratic Senate leader, says, “I don’t see any legislation we would attempt to undo.”
Very telling. The last two years of the first Clinton administration haven’t been Bill Clinton’s at all. They have been Newt’s. Congress now dominates American politics as it hasn’t since the days of Uncle Joe Cannon.
And still the whole enterprise does have an air of defeat about it. This has to do with the budget battle of last December, of course. It was a disaster born of nearsighted Republican enthusiasm. They thought that by mere manipulation of existing interest groups and “coalitions” they might remake the political present in their own image. It doesn’t work. It never works. Major, reality-upending designs of political philosophy require careful, time- consuming means: persistent national persuasion, subsidiary victories, vetoproof majorities. Or a president who unambiguously shares the goal.
We will probably not get such a president on November 5. There’s an outside chance, if the presidential election goes badly enough, that Republican turnout will be so depressed as to allow — in what should be an incumbent’s year of unusual public satisfaction — the Democratic party to sneak back into fullscale power. If that horror is avoided, and if conservatism is to be jump-started in the next two years or four, the Republican party will have to recover the political touch and patience that produced such a remarkable 104th Congress in the first place.
David Tell, for the Editors
