THIS IS THE BEST REPUBLICANS could muster: not a principled assault on the tobacco bill, but a clever scheme to destroy the bill by ostensibly improving it. The backhanded effort, pursued by a half-dozen conservative Republican senators, worked brilliantly — up to a point. They managed to modify the legislation in two significant ways: by funding anti-drug programs, and by earmarking dollars to eliminate the marriage penalty in federal taxation (both measures passed the Senate by narrow majorities). These were supposed to be killer amendments, ones the White House, anti-tobacco zealots, and Senate backers of the tobacco bill would find so unpalatable the bill would have to be jettisoned. But in the end, the killer amendments didn’t kill. Clinton and the bill’s supporters gulped, then decided to go ahead with the measure in spite of the conservative modifications.
There are more killer amendments on the way. But even if they succeed and the bill dies, Republicans won’t be seen as profiles in courage in the tobacco debate. Start with this: The tobacco bill, sponsored by GOP senator John McCain of Arizona and crafted in consultation with the White House, is the worst major policy proposal since Clinton’s healthcare initiative in 1993. In fact, it’s similar. It’s social engineering by Washington with higher taxes, more bureaucracy, and less personal responsibility. It would provide billions to trial lawyers, sworn enemies of the GOP, to use against Republican candidates and to finance more lawsuits. Yet majority leader Trent Lott, like his predecessor Bob Dole on health care, favors compromise over opposition. And most Republicans — with the notable exception of John Ashcroft of Missouri — are afraid to take on the bill frontally, if at all. They accept the notion that the public is clamoring for tobacco legislation and will punish politicians who get in the way.
Thus GOP foes of the bill chose subterfuge. After Ashcroft’s lone “no” vote failed to prevent the bill from clearing the Commerce Committee 19-1, six anti-tobacco-bill Republicans — Phil Gramm of Texas, Pete Domenici of New Mexico, Larry Craig of Idaho, Paul Coverdell of Georgia, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and Ashcroft — conferred. They concluded the Ashcroft approach — full-throated, open opposition — wouldn’t work on the Senate floor. Rather, they’d need to pretend to be interested in improving the bill, while actually aiming to drive several stakes through its heart. Their weapons would be amendments designed to be as objectionable as possible to the bill’s enthusiasts.
Coverdell’s amendment was the most obnoxious of all. It would beef up the anti-drug programs of the federal government, absorbing roughly one-third of the money otherwise allocated to anti-tobacco programs. There was worse from the standpoint of the bill’s supporters. The Customs Service would be allowed to ignore a collective-bargaining agreement with a government employees’ union and deploy its agents wherever it wanted. Worse still, Coverdell threw in school vouchers for kids in drug-infested and high-crime areas — money to go to private or religious schools. McCain pleaded with Coverdell to drop the Customs and voucher provisions. Coverdell wouldn’t budge, and his killer amendment passed. Then, to his surprise, the bill’s backers said they still wanted to pass it, figuring they’d have a chance to straighten it out in a Senate-House conference later this year.
The foes had another tactic: delay. Sen. Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina joked that swallowing a June bug that flies into your mouth as you’re riding a motorcycle at 60 miles per hour is better than swallowing one after examining it in a glass jar for two weeks. Lott initially wanted to finish work on the bill in April, then before the Memorial Day recess. But the opponents dragged out the debate, spotlighting issues like the cost of the bill, the regressive taxes, the lavish fees for trial lawyers, the limits on liability for the tobacco companies but not for companies that manufacture, say, medical devices. The Senate Republican Policy Committee provided a fresh (and credible) estimate of how much revenue the bill would draw from the private sector: closer to $ 800 billion than the $ 500 billion projected by McCain. Delay worked, and when Democrats tried to shut off debate, they not only failed but irritated Lott.
Given all the unattractive features of the bill, might a principled attack have been more effective? Ashcroft thinks so. Among potential Republican presidential candidates, he alone uses stump speeches to trash the bill. “They may call it a tobacco bill, but only in Washington do bad choices by free people become an excuse for a massive tax hike,” he declared at the South Carolina Republican convention in May. On the Senate floor, Ashcroft has challenged the assumptions of the bill. He pointed, for example, to study after study finding that smokers are not price sensitive. McCain’s lame response was to cite tobacco-company documents in which officials expressed fears that higher prices would curb smoking.
Ashcroft believes the analogy with Clinton’s health-care bill is still apt. In 1994, Washington was the last to learn that ClintonCare had lost favor around the country. Now, as James Bowman notes in the New Criterion, “the anti-tobacco frenzy seems largely confined to politics and the media, where it has taken on a life of its own.” In early June, a Washington Post reporter questioned people in St. Louis about tobacco legislation and found mostly indifference. And voters, in a survey by Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, said drugs (39 percent), gangs (16 percent), alcohol (9 percent), reckless driving (9 percent), and sex (7 percent) are bigger sources of worry about teenagers than smoking (2 percent). Four years ago, when Republicans, plus some Democrats, discovered that the Clinton health plan had lost favor with the public, they turned on it brutally, and it died. Now it’s time to do the same with the tobacco bill.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
