What explains conservative doubts about the political success of their own limited government principles, as we near the end of the first year of the first Republican, and most conservative, Congress in more than 40 years? We refer here not to House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose forecast of orderly enactment for the fiscal 1996 budget (quoted above) strikes us as essentially accurate — if somewhat mischievously rosy. Instead, it’s his would-be, should-be conservative allies who seem troubled. Many of them regard any such end-game scenario, involving resolution of a budget over anything short of President Clinton’s dead body, as sissy talk — or even treason. This week’s ostensible conservative hero is Bob Dole (!), who on Sept. 5 in Chicago assured the world, and likely Republican primary voters, that “this will not be an autumn of compromise.” “No compromise,” in this context, of course, means the federal “train wreck” that so intrigues offcial Washington at the moment. Hill Republicans have sworn to pass a 1996 spending plan the subsequent-year implications of which involve a perfectly balanced federal budget by 2002. The 13 appropriations bills that form the domestic discretionary portion of this spending will be at the president’s desk on or around the first of October. He has indicated an intention to veto most of them; their program cuts are too “cruel.” He probably will. But he holds a weak hand. Absent his signature, all but a limited number of the “essential” government services covered by these bills must cease operations. And those services — all the acronymic junk at the Departments of Labor, HHS, and so on — primarily benefit, and were created by, his people: Democrats and liberals. Soon enough, Clinton’s knees will surely buckle, and the appropriations bills will become law, on largely Republican terms.
The massive reconciliation bill that completes the budget process, and includes all non-appropriated entitlement spending, is a slightly different kettle of fish. It, too, will be denounced for excessive cruelty and vetoed. But here the president has every reason to stick with his veto as long as he dares. Barring the changes to existing law that such a reconciliation bill would make, federal entitlement spending — again, for a largely Democratic constituency — simply continues at its current rate.
Until, that is, the legislated federal debt ceiling is reached sometime in mid-November. At that point, unless Congress votes to raise the ceiling, Treasury Department borrowing authority will lapse, and the government will begin, technically at least, to default on its due debt obligations. In the first week of December, Social Security checks will be affected.
There is weird unanimity of enthusiasm for this train wreck in the capital these days — except maybe for that last part. No question: It would make a great story, so news people are shamelessly promoting the prospect. Democrats are warming to the idea, too. It protects their pet spending projects in the near-term, and they’d like to believe that Republicans will get most of the blame for the ensuing chaos, or back down before it comes. Conservatives, if anything, like the train wreck idea best of all. It’s tough. It signals steadfast adherence to the principle of a balanced budget by seven-year date certain. Republicans will get credit for sticking to their guns. And if they don’t, or so the argument goes, conservatism, and the meaning of last year’s historic election, will be betrayed.
Not so fast. Last year’s voters loudly declared their disgust with an ineffcient, intrusive, and ruinously expensive federal government. They elected a Republican Congress to do something about it, big time, by sharply curtailing the size, scope, and reach of the executive branch. And yes, absolutely, sooner is better than later. But if Congress can ad ourn this year with a budget agreement that significantly cuts taxes, cuts domestic spending, and slows entitlement growth, then Republicans — and conservatives — can and should claim success. The fact that Clint9n’s signature will be on it won’t by itself turn the deal rotten. And bedrock conservative principle won’t have been violated, even if, in the process, the zero-deficit “,target sadly slips, say, from seven years to eight.
Now, it’s true that conservatives with purist politics and pessimistic temperaments aren’t waiting for such a less than perfect outcome to feel betrayed. A perfectly strong theoretical case can be made that they’ve been betrayed already by a 104th Congress, whose seven-year balanced budget plan conducts only relatively minor surgery on the institutional viscera of liberalism. This complaint is given eloquent form by David Frum elsewhere in these pages. The Energy and Education Departments, for example, originally targeted for elimination in the House, will survive for now. So will lots of other comparably pernicious waste.
But, they: Why not balance the budget in five years, instead of seven? The Cato Institute’s fiscal 1996 budget proposal would have imposed spending reductions sufficient to achieve that goal, while providing tax cuts of $ 400 billion, roughly twice the size of those expected in the Republican reconciliation bill. Looking back over the Cato plan’s details — a long, muscular list of program reductions and outright terminations — you nod your head in conservative agreement. Looks good.
Speaker Gingrich would almost certainly agree.
But the ugly, unavoidable truth is that it turns out a five-year balanced budget, though powerfully attractive, is still politically infeasible. The votes aren’t there. And neither, yet at least, are the voters. Which is why Hill Republicans, professional politicians each of them, chose seven years instead. No shame attaches to that decision. And no shame — not much, anyway — should attach if, at the end of the day, fiscal balance is delayed a small bit further. Our friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page issued an anxious warning on Sept. 7 that any movement away from the $ 270 billion Medicare savings target Republicans have advanced will constitute “a 1990- style budget compromise.” Actually, no. It won’t.
For conservatives still on the rebound from the Bush Administration — and who among us isn’t? — a habitual suspicion of anything that smells like ” compromise” may be forgiven. But the situation we face this year is almost exactly the reverse of that produced by the 1990 Andrews Air Force Base ” budget summit” catastrophe. Then, we lost. George Mitchell and Tom Foley won. That infamous deal gave us a large, broad tax increase, something Mr. Bush had vowed never to allow. We also got a huge increase in domestic discretionary spending and accelerated growth in entitlement programs.
This year, though, we win. They lose. At bottom, a “1995 budget deal” would directly reverse 1990’s embarrassments to Republican honor. That deal would be somewhat less than ideal, perhaps, but movement in the right direction just the same.
On the biggest remaining partisan sticking point, Medicare, Congress and the White House are already much closer than each party’s talking points care to admit. The difference in proposed spending reductions is roughly $ 10 billion annually. The Republican number involves a cap in the growth of Medicare expenditures of 6.4 percent a year, more than the increase projected between now and 2005 from medical inflation and Medicare enrollment growth combined. So the GOP goal won’t be without practical consequence, but it isn’t politically unrealistic, either. And even if Republicans were somehow forced to give up the whole $ 10 billion in each of the next seven years, which is inconceivable, we’d still be left with the following result: Domestic discretionary spending on those federal programs that conservatives most love to hate would decline in real terms; tax cuts would be granted in some form; and entitlement growth would substantially shrink.
We can understand why the Republican majority might threaten to douse the government with gasoline and actually light a match. It’s a good, hard-eyed bargaining strategy to make the coming budget deal even better. But should conservatives relish the possibility of a real conflagration if it risks consuming that majority in the process? Mr. Gingrich made a bold decision at the beginning of this year to attempt genuine Congressional government in America for the first time in many decades. That decision has paid off. Republicans and conservatives have dominated national politics ever since. One notable result, however, is that many Americans quite correctly believe that it’s the Speaker himself up front, not the president, driving the train we’re all talking about wrecking. It’s by no means clear that conservatism would benefit from the crash that might result from this game of budgetary chicken.
Unless, of course, you think a shoot-the-moon budget gamble this fall is our last and only hope, because the conservative future looks pretty grim. We don’t agree. THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the first issue of which you hold in your hands, is born in the aftermath of a national election the significance of which cannot be overestimated. Turnout was up — a lot. Incumbents did fine, provided they were Republicans. The highest House GOP vote count in any previous off-year election had been under 28 million. In 1994 it was almost 37 million, 9 million nore than in 1990, the largest vote increase for any party in a single cycle in the entire history of the United States. In elections for state office — which are further removed from national politics, and therefore less easy to “blame” on President Clinton personally – – the Republican victory was even bigger. The GOP now controls a majority of governorships. And having netted almost 500 seats nationwide, Republicans now also control a majority of state legislative chambers, where before November Democrats had enjoyed a two-to-one margin.
A huge surge of votes like this for a single maior party has happened only rarely in our history, and only once before in this century: in the early 1930s, for Democrats, at the beginning of the New Deal. Scholars divide American political history into a series of clearly defined “party systems.” There have been five or six of them, depending on how you count. The New Deal period of liberal activism and Democratic party dominance was the last one.
And it’s over. Forever. After 65 years, led by the Republican party, there has been a conservative realignment.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD intends to speak for, interpret, and guide this realignment. We have every reason to expect it will last. Congressional retirements and district-by-district results from 1994 suggest, so far as such predictions may safely be made this far in advance, that Republican majoritis will expand next year. In almost three years, Mr. Clinton’s base of popular support has not increased a jot beyond the 43 percent who voted for him in 1992. His party’s 1994 campaign would, on a state-by-state basis, win him only 73 electoral votes next year. And public approval of the current Republican Congress remains quite firm, as these things go: 52-35 in the latest Gallup Poll, for example.
The GOP’s final remaining challenge this year will be producing the Medicare growth reductions necessary to achieve all the other policy goals embedded in its budget, while at the same time retaining a level of broad popular support that will allow conservatism to expand those achievements in the future. Time reports that its respondents prefer smaller cuts in Medicare and a ten-year balanced budget plan, President Clinton’s (admittedly phony) proposal, over larger Republican cuts and a seven-year plan, by a 41- 19 margin. Other polls aren’t quite so bad. But they’re not great, either. Gallup has the Clinton vs. Congress Medicare “preference” difference at 45-38.
It’s perfectly legitimate for Hill Republicans to take such numbers — to take public opinion — into account. We won’t be at all surprised !if the Republican leadership spends the next few weeks denying even the remote possibility that its budget targets might get looser. In fact, we’d be disappointed if they didn’t; that’s how a sophisticated endgame is played. No one will cheer louder than this magazine if Gingrich and Dole do manage to force a seven-year path to budgetary balance. It could well happen. Clinton could blink. A scoring dispute could provide cover for some promised out-year adjustments. But barring some unforeseen development, we expect to be cheering the fiscal 1996 budget outcome one way or the other.
There’ll undoubtedly be plenty of occasions for conservative disappointment in the future. The Clinton-Dole-Gingrich Rose Garden budget-signing ceremony probably won’t be one of them.
The first year of a seoen year budget plan is the year you make the mark. Pe intend to make that mark, and… I think there’s no doubt that once we get the work to the president’s desk he’ll be happy to pick up his pen and sign it and say, “Mr. and Mrs. America, I’ve heard what you want, I’m proud of the Congress for responding, and I’m proud to put my stamp of approval on it.
