WASHINGTON -- Exhausted but exhilarated, House Republicans reach the midpoint in their 100-day -- today, claiming remarkable progress on an ambitious legislative agenda but admitting that the toughest part of the course lies ahead.
By congressional standards, GOP House members have been moving at the speed of light, meeting five days a week and long into the night to fulfill the promises of their "Contract with America," the campaign document that helped propel Republicans to control of Congress.
"The first 50 days was amazing," House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared yesterday.
The Georgia lawmaker said the broad bipartisan margins by which the House has adopted major initiatives -- including a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, greater presidential veto power over spending, and protection for states from costly federal mandates -- "clearly indicated a change from business as usual in Washington."
But the speaker acknowledged that Republicans are now heading into "what I think frankly is the harder period," with the most complex and contentious elements of the GOP contract still waiting to test their unity and will.
Before their self-imposed 100-day deadline is reached April 13, House Republicans have promised action on measures that would roll back federal regulations, restrict the ability to bring lawsuits, overhaul the welfare system and target enough spending reductions to offset the $200 billion in promised tax cuts.
The GOP has also promised to bring to the House floor within 100 days legislation that would limit congressional terms -- the one contract item Mr. Gingrich hinted yesterday would probably fail.
"The tough votes haven't even come yet," said Rep. John P. Murtha, a 12-term Pennsylvania Democrat. "All we've done so far is a bunch of stuff sponsored by Democrats that has already passed the House before. The defining moment will come when they have to vote on the tax cuts."
Looming over the tax cut package is the House GOP promise to balance the budget by the year 2002, beginning with a proposal due in May that could require up to $700 billion in spending cuts over the next five years. There's already talk of dropping some proposed tax cuts in order to make that job easier.
Meanwhile, the balky, independent Senate, also controlled by Republicans, threatens to undo much of the House handiwork.
The Senate has acted on only two of the House contract items so far, passing the bill to restrain the federal government from imposing costly mandates on the states without providing the money to pay for them, and approving a measure applying to Congress the same labor and safety laws imposed on private industry.
Only the labor and safety bill has been sent to President Clinton and signed into law.
Senate roadblocks
More than a month of Senate debate on the balanced budget amendment is scheduled to conclude Feb. 28, but the outcome is still uncertain. The bill that would enhance presidential veto power -- the so-called line-item veto -- is meeting Senate resistance.
Senate Republican leaders have predicted major changes to the crime legislation the house passed last week. They have raised doubts about the House approach to welfare reform and attacked the proposed tax cuts as poorly timed for a government deeply in debt.
Bob Dole of Kansas, the Senate majority leader who is launching a bid for the GOP presidential nomination, frequently points out that none of the GOP senators signed the contract.
"That's the only good news," said Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, a Baltimore Democrat who criticizes Republicans' "slavish addiction" to their contract. He said the contract diverts the House from more urgent issues, such as health care reform.
L "Most of this stuff is never going to get enacted," he said.
Maybe not.
But the energy, unity, and zeal with which the new Republican House majority has undertaken its mission is nonetheless impressive, historians say.
Not since President Lyndon B. Johnson rushed through his Great Society program in 1965 has Congress gotten off to such a fast start.
"They are doing amazingly well," said James Thurber, head of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. "I was skeptical, I still am. But they are meeting their promises to bring up these issues and put them to a vote."
The GOP contract makes no promises that any of its featured legislation will be enacted -- only that it will be brought up on the House floor for a vote before 100 days have elapsed.
Freshman commitment
But the 73 House GOP freshmen, in particular, consider themselves committed to getting the contract provisions passed.
They've lost only two fights so far: an effort to include in the balanced budget amendment a requirement that three-fifths of each house must approve tax increases, and an attempt to revive the Reagan-era, spaced-based missile defense system known as "star wars."
"This is a fundamentally different Congress," said Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a freshman Republican from Maryland. He said he has been struck by his colleagues' willingness to cut their own staffs and to talk seriously about eliminating whole federal agencies.
"It's really interesting what's happening on the other side of the aisle," Mr. Ehrlich said, where "40 to 50 Democrats are voting with Republicans almost all the time."
The badly fractured Democrats are still trying to adjust to their minority status. A liberal core fights the GOP on every issue; a conservative swing group attempts compromise with some success, such as in resisting the tax vote requirement on the balanced budget amendment.
"We are trying to moderate their extremes," said Rep. W. J. "Billy" Tauzin, a Louisiana Democrat, who was an original sponsor of some proposals now in the GOP contract, including a measure designed to protect property rights.
'Fast and furious'
"I've never worked so hard in my life. I'm exhausted," Mr. Tauzin said. "I think the Republican strategy is not to defeat the Democrats, but to wear them down and kill them."
The stress of what House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas calls the "fast and furious" pace has taken its toll elsewhere, particularly on House committees, which fashion the detailed legislation.
"They are going crazy," said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar for the Brookings Institution. "Some committees, like Ways and Means and Judiciary, are so overworked," he said, they are depending on outside help to draft bills.
House members are scrambling to keep up, said Rep. Sue W. Kelly, a freshman Republican from suburban New York City. But, said Ms. Kelly, she and her colleagues are delighting in the experience.
"We're so into it we just talk about legislation all the time," Ms. Kelly said. A believer in term limits, she added: "I intend to work so hard that I'm absolutely pooped when I leave in six or eight years."