It would be impossible to exaggerate how badly Republican budget-balance rs feel they’ve been vio lated by the White House these past several months. Ev en by Washington standards, administration budget tactics have been astonishing ly crude and deceitful. So you can sympathize with the still-wide-spread GOP re luctance fully t o abandon its government shutdown weapon until the president finally capitulates.
But that strategy isn’t working. The “leverage” of a government shutdown, however it might be modified in the future, is obviously insufficient to force Bill Clinton’s concurrence in a genuine balanced budget. And because congressional Republicans control too few votes to override his veto, such a budget requires the president’s okay. He’ll either sign it or he won’t, depending entirely on how he calculates his reelection possibilities — a fact that infuriates the suddenly helpless GOP all the more.
Instead of getting mad to no effect, though, maybe it’s time for Republicans to get even. Maybe it’s time to call the whole thing off, place blame for fiscal failure where it justly resides — with Clinton — and take the issue to the country. All the way to November.
The current round of Washington budget summitry began on Nov. 28 in the Mansfield Room of the Capitol. As that first meeting was breaking up, House budget committee chairman John Kasich asked Leon Panetta if the White House would present its own seven-year balanced-budget plan using accounting assumptions employed by Congress. Panetta told Kasich yes, they would. The president had already pledged, in writing, his cooperation in the achievement of such a deal. And without a detailed, consistently “scored” opening bid from the administration, the two sides would be unable seriously to negotiate the differences between them, big and small.
On Dec. 15, in the same room, it came time to pony up. Kasich and his Senate counterpart, Pete Domenici, made a new offer, using relaxed deficit projections from the Congressional Budget Office to move $ 75 billion in Clinton’s direction on Medicare and other social spending. Panetta, for the White House, offered . . . nothing. Less than nothing, in fact. His “plan” was an outline only, using administration budgeting conventions.
Leon, you promised, the stunned Republicans “complained. “No, I didn’t,” Panetta replied. In politics, as in real life, this is what’s called a flat- out lie.
Several weeks into the resulting shutdown, Democratic budget boorishness has only gotten worse. On Wednesday, Jan. 3, for example, just before the Republican leadership was due to leave for the West Wing and another fruitless talk session, they got a call from the White House. Please hold up a while, they were asked; the president’s got a tiny scheduling issue. Which issue, minutes later, turned out to be a nationally televised presidential “news briefing,” during which Clinton dumped all over the GOP for a “cynical political strategy” on the budget, one that has hurt “pregnant women, the disabled, and poor children.” Congress should reopen the government, the president proclaimed. “Both sides want to balance the budget,” after all.
You’d have thought so. On paper, at least, they’re tantalizingly close to agreement on a seven-year deal conservatives would hardly have dared dream about not long ago. At the outside limit, Congress and the White House are divided by maybe $ 60 billion a year, less than 4 percent of total government spending — on a budget that would, either way, almost certainly reduce taxes, end the federal welfare entitlement, salvage (by partially marketizing) Medicare, and impose real-dollar cuts in domestic social programs for the first time in a quarter century. Not a happy prospect for liberalism.
But for the longest time it seemed Clinton was prepared to do it, just the same. If he engineered a few loud, phony disputes over Republican “extremism” during the negotiations, maybe the Left wouldn’t notice how Right the final deal really was. And that deal in hand, the president would be immunized against an otherwise obvious fall campaign charge from his Republican challenger: that Bill Clinton is the only thing standing between America and a balanced budget.
This script has worked even better than the White House had hoped — apparently to the point where they no longer feel they need to stick with it all the way to the end. Clinton is having endless, high-profile meetings with the Republican leadership, meetings that confer unearned legitimacy on his claimed “support” for a balanced budget. Republicans protest that the president isn’t really willing to balance the budget. But out there in the hinterland, what swing voter can be expected to understand that’s true? From a distance, it really might look like the GOP has adopted an “our way or no way” budget posture, and that Clinton really ts merely defending the “helpless. ” Helpless people like 90-year-old Joseph Rourke, whom congressional Democrats recently pushed before the cameras to report how his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife may, under a shutdown, lose access to the federal Meals on Wheels program.
Now, Mr. and Mrs. Rourke live in the Ward Circle area of Washington, D.C., a tony neighborhood of 5300,000-plus homes. And the Meals on Wheels program is fu nded through a Labor/HHS appropriations bill that would pass Congress easily — if only Senate Democrats would drop their filibuster threat (over an unrelated labor-movement issue) and allow a vote. No matter. This can’t be explained on the evening news. In the unreality of Washington political theater, Republicans arc once again the evil landlord. And Grandma’s getting pushed out into the snow.
In a few short weeks, if the current budget dynamics aren’t sharply altered, the president will arrive at the Capitol for his State of the Union address and use an hour and a half of prime time to bemoan “gridlock” over the balanced budget he wants and the nation deserves. Only the heartless extremism of his Republican opponents stands in the way of that glory, he will say. It will be a disgusting, dishonest performance. Everyone will then return to the bargaining table. The deal will never actually get done — because the president doesn’t really need it to. Ross Perot will have his excuse to run for president as a spoiler. And then Bill Clinton may occupy the Oval Office until the 21st century.
Enough, already. Hill Republicans should move to end this farce. But not the way the nervous moderates among them now imagine. The government shouldn’t reopen “until budget negotiations are concluded.” That’s exactly backwards. Negotiations should cease first — immediately and forever.
The GOP should make a big, splashy, good-faith and final offer — magnanimously agreeing to split remaining differences with the White House. If Clinton takes the deal, fine: Congress can pass a good, strong, creditable conservative budget. But if Clinton declines, there should be no more bargaining. The Republican leadership should spend a few sorrowful days reminding the country how hard they tried, and how the president wasn’t even prepared to meet them halfway. Then — and only then — Speaker Gingrich and Senator Dole can pass continuing resolutions to reopen closed government offices (and a debt-limit extension to prevent the Treasury from defaulting on its debt obligations next month).
The bad news is the budget won’t get balanced this year. Once it’s clear that’s what’s happening, the financial markets may go south, and recession fears will intensify. A pity. But the good news is things will look like what they are — Bill Clinton’s fault — if Republicans play their cards skillfully. And this year’s GOP presidential candidate will have a pretty good campaign plank in the fall.
It was always true: Without Clinton’s signature, we can’t have a balanced budget this year. Right now, it appears we need a new president for that. Congressional Republicans should work quickly to improve the chances we get one.
David Tell, for the Editors
