November 19, 1995
Mission Impassable;After a Budget Side Show, This Way to the Egress
By ADAM CLYMER
FINALLY, the main event. Congress's votes to send President Clinton the Republicans' budget reconciliation bill, with its seven-year balanced budget, tax cut and sharp curbs of Medicare and Medicaid spending, will take a very serious fight beyond side issues.
The national debt and partial closing of the Government are hardly trivial, but as political problems they do not approach the one posed by the budget -- just how big a role the Federal Government should have in American life.
That is the issue, obscured by childish squabbles over tee times and face time, that must now be solved. For the choice, as Speaker Newt Gingrich contends, may be "the largest domestic decision since 1933," determining whether the central government remains the guarantor of basic standards in areas like health, welfare and the environment, or whether states and individuals can do it better.
Both sides underestimated their opposition's determination and climbed out on limbs. Each side's preferred solution, of course, is to push the other off the limb. But, as William Kristol, the conservative strategist, said last week, "I'm not sure either side has that much leverage."
That does not stop both sides from predicting victory. "I think the President will come our way," said Tony Blankley, Mr. Gingrich's press secretary. Democrats sound confident that Medicare is so important to voters that sooner or later Republicans will give up their plans to tamper with the program's future.
If neither side gives up -- and now that Mr. Clinton is swearing that he will veto the budget, some of the Congressmen who feared his inconstancy are getting weak in the knees -- there will be an impasse that makes this month's fights over debt and spending seem like no more than a morning traffic tie-up.
The problem is less the policy chasm between the two sides than the uncompromising political personalities of the 73 House Republican freshmen, and a leadership who that sometimes seem to lead by following them. Except for that signal characteristic of the 104th Congress, which reflects an almost Biblical sense of destiny after 40 years in the political wilderness, there would be ways to bridge the chasm.
In another political era, perhaps just last year, it would have been no trick at all to compromise the basic budget disputes between President Clinton and Congress.
The Republicans have voted to balance the budget in seven years, with $245 billion in tax cuts. That goal requires taking $270 billion from the growth of Medicare, and biting deeply into Medicaid, education and programs meant to protect the environment. Democrats say those cuts are too deep. But Democrats are increasingly eager to say they want a balanced budget, too.
So, what kind of a deal would you make?
Thomas S. Foley, whose career as Speaker was ended by the Republican revolution last election day, offered a simple prescription: "Think about the possibility of an eight-year period, without the tax cut." With this approach, each side could claim to have put the good of the country ahead of diehard stubbornness. Each side would have some political cover when spending reductions begin to pinch.
But Mr. Foley confesses that he does not know if such an approach is possible with the House's Republican freshman contingent, elected as sworn enemies of the compromise as evil business as usual.
Another Washington veteran, former Senator and Treasury secretary Lloyd Bentsen, a Democrat, says compromise cannot be achieved now: "First they have to find that they are not going to have their way on everything. It just doesn't work that way."
Things might also be fixed easily with some revisions in the economic assumptions provided by the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans have insisted on using its economic estimates, more conservative than most others, including the Administration's. Because they project less tax revenue, they require deeper spending cuts. A very light finger on the scales, if it put the C.B.O. at the middle of current economic forecasts instead of the bottom, would free up hundreds of billions of estimated dollars. But the C.B.O. has never played that way.
One recourse that requires neither compromise nor surrender -- just patience -- was offered from St. Louis by former Senator John C. Danforth. He argued that his fellow Republicans cannot compromise or give up their cause of cutting spending to balance the budget. But he said that if the President remains firm and his vetoes are sustained, they may have to wait until the Presidential election next year to finish that fight.
"We could take the high ground," Mr. Danforth said, "and say we are not going to allow the country to be hurt" by Government shutdowns and high-wire management of the national debt. Republicans could then go along with spending and debt measures that will last through the election, and allow the American people to show, he said, "whether they really mean it when they say they want to balance the budget, or to keep on spending."
President Clinton seems to like the idea of making the election a referendum.
In an interview last week with CBS News, Mr. Clinton said of the budget dispute, "If we take it right into the next election, let the American people decide." If the people want the Republican budget, he said, "they're entitled to another President, and that's the only way they are going to get it."
The idea has some appeal to conservatives outside Congress, like Mr. Kristol or Mickey Edwards, the former Republican Congressman from Oklahoma who now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Mr. Edwards thinks the idea might sell, but only if President Clinton understands that Republicans have to have some immediate victory, like Representative Ernest Istook's amendment prohibiting political activity by recipients of Federal grants (a proposal whose foes say is so unconstitutional that it would immediately be enjoined anyway).
The Republican leaders "have to be able to show their freshmen members that 'we didn't win it all in one fell swoop, but we're on our way,' " Mr. Edwards said. "Outside of that, I don't think Newt has any flexibility."
Dole's Quiet Time
The player with the least flexibility of all may be Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the majority leader and the most experienced deal-maker involved. Mr. Dole's hopes for the Presidency require him to court the absolutists in his party. Even so, his once-sharp tongue has been muted, at least by comparison to Mr. Gingrich's.
Another essential to agreement -- even if it is only agreeing to disagree -- is a greater level of civility.
On Friday night, House members got into a shoving match.
Yesterday, the House erupted into partisan shouting after Representative John L. Mica said of Mr. Clinton and his shifting views on budget balancing, "We're here to nail the little bugger down." He was ruled out of order, but the No. 3 Republican leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, pushed through a motion to let him resume speaking.
Any sort of agreement will not come easy, though. If both sides agree on a way to commit themselves to balancing the budget, and they may, the arguments over how to balance it will finally begin. And then, if nothing is settled by Christmas, the national debt and the threat of default will take center stage again.
No wonder Congress is keeping most of its staff on the payroll as essential.
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