REPUBLICANS ARE EXITING the first Congress they’ve controlled in 40 years in terror-stricken retreat. Senate majority leader Trent Lott says they just want to get their work done and go home. He and others admit that their reluctance to risk political fights carries a cost. They probably erred in passing a bill forcing insurance companies to give equal treatment to mental- health claims, Lott concedes, and his deputy, Don Nickles, says the GOP may have passed bad legislation in its haste to leave Washington. Yet no one favors a strategy of confrontation, which could lead to a repeat of last winter’s government shutdowns.
Rep. Mark Souder, one of the most intransigent Republican freshmen, gives a taste of the new GOP tone when he warns against a new round of brinkmanship. Indeed, the prevailing Republican fear is that a repeat of last year’s confrontations would cause bad press and could cost the GOP control of Congress. Thus does political fear trump principle. The Republicans rationalize their leftward drift on spending and health care as the way to keep the Democrats in the minority.
Maybe it will. In any case, it’s been clear for weeks that the GOP would pay almost any price for Democratic cooperation on the budget. Just two years ago, Bob Dole skillfully blocked Democratic initiatives in the weeks before the 1994 election, but this time Republicans are handing their opponents policy victories. House Appropriations chairman Bob Livingston acknowledged as much to reporters, saying, “Chances are the president is going to get a lot of what he’s asked for. That’s in the interest of getting out of here.” The Democrats are enjoying this. A grinning Senate minority leader Tom Daschle calls Republicans “extremely cooperative” and adds, “We kind of anticipated that in their rush to get out of town they would agree to what we had been asking for.”
When a Democratic leader lauds Republicans, it’s obvious they’ve gone astray. Democrats may moan about the excesses of the Republican Congress, but they know they’ve made out well for a minority. At the administration’s request, $ 6.5 billion in new spending for education and human services was added to an appropriations bill, and an amendment passed requiring health insurers to cover 48-hour hospital stays for new mothers. This came on top of an increase in the minimum wage, a softening of the immigration bill, and a general loosening of the purse strings. “If you consider the ’94 election to be the equivalent of the Allied landing at Normandy,” says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, “the last three weeks have been the political equivalent of the Germans’ driving the Allies off the beaches.”
But if you’re looking for dissension in GOP ranks, you won’t find much. Souder’s view is representative. He fits the stereotype of a House Republican freshman: fiercely conservative, devoutly religious, sometimes annoyingly principled. During last winter’s budget showdown he was one of a handful of Republicans who voted against the GOP budget that reopened the government, decrying it as soft on spending.
Today, he freely admits Republicans have caved. And while he wishes they hadn’t, he recognizes the political constraints they face. Rather than advocate actions that could result in a shutdown, he hopes to repair this year’s damage with a bill that cuts spending next year (assuming Congress is Republican). “Last year we pushed the system about as hard as it can be pushed and look where it got us,” he says. He likens the current situation to an arm-wrestling bout in which one side is nearly exhausted. Instead of expending all remaining energy when there’s little hope of staving off defeat — much less winning — the course of wisdom is to lose gracefully and gear up for the next bout.
The bitter irony about the Congress’s lurch and broader disarray is that much of it is due to Republicans. Take the mental-health mandate. Sen. Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was chief sponsor of the amendment. The U. S. Chamber of Commerce called this mandate “absolutely inconsistent” with a ” private, market-based health care system.” But when Domenici, who has a daughter who suffers from mental illness, attached the amendment to an appropriations bill, only 15 senators (all Republicans) voted against it. In the House, Republican leaders told their members to support the measure, promising it wouldn’t survive the conference committee, and only 17 declined. But House Republican conferees, tired of being asked to do the Senate’s dirty work, left the mandate in the final appropriations bill.
More than tension between the chambers was involved here. When Mark Isakowitz, lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business, pointed out the problems with the mental-health provision, notably the burden it would impose on small businesses, GOP leaders told him “politics” made it hard to vote no. In fact, with influential Republican deficit hawks like Domenici and Rep. John Kasich behind the measure — and the potential political damage from a “mean-spirited” vote on everyone’s mind — passage was never in doubt. Neil Trautwein, who watches health care for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, deplores the Republicans’ surrender on mental health but says it is nothing new: “We’ve spent much of this Congress trying to keep the government out of benefit policy, and it’s clearly been disappointing.”
Then there’s illegal immigration. The bill was mostly noncontroversial within the GOP, except for a provision sponsored by Rep. Elton Gallegly of California allowing states to bar children of illegal immigrants from public school. Bob Dole strongly favored the provision, as did House members from California, but Senate Democrats threatened to filibuster the bill as long as it contained the politically sensitive measure. This prompted Sen. Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican and longtime immigration hawk, to push privately to remove the amendment and improve the bill’s chances of passing.
A stormy meeting with Dole campaign manager Scott Reed on September 12 produced no agreement, and Simpson railed. Those advising Dole on the issue were “boneheaded” and guilty of “childish logic,” “trickery,” and “cynicism.” The same could be said of Simpson, who had previously agreed to the Gallegly amendment. House speaker Newt Gingrich fought to retain it, but Simpson’s public break opened the door for others, and on September 19, Republicans agreed to remove the amendment from the bill and consider it separately. Clinton is now likely to sign the bill, denying Dole one of the few weapons he could have used against the president in California.
The silver lining to these dark clouds is that all this radical moderation may actually dispel some of the public’s fears about Republicans, If as a result the GOP preserves its congressional majorities, the late-term sellouts will soon look like a bargain. Anything less, however, and the ballyhooed ” Republican revolution” may come to seem like much ado about nothing.
by Matthew Rees
