WASHINGTON -- As Republican leaders gathered early last month to celebrate the year's congressional achievements, two vans unexpectedly drove up to the Capitol steps to unload Kenneth W. Starr's searing impeachment report.
The symbolism was perfect. The independent counsel had been upstaging the Republicans for months as they sought to shrug off the Democrats' "do-nothing" label for Congress. Yet Starr did prompt Republicans to undertake one momentous endeavor: the third presidential impeachment inquiry in history.
Now, with just over two weeks left before the elections, %o members must campaign on a short list of legislative achievements and an impeachment proceeding that has left voters decidedly skeptical. Lawmakers left town yesterday to campaign over the weekend, vowing to return Tuesday to approve a $500 billion spending deal that completes the government's $1.7 trillion budget for fiscal 1999.
"It's rare I've felt they needed to get home as much as they need to do now," said Stephen Hess, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. "This was always a Congress that didn't want to do anything, but now they are doing one big thing" -- deciding the fate of the president.
The interplay among three parties -- the Republican Congress, the Democratic president and the independent counsel -- has colored all of Washington's triumphs and defeats this year.
President Clinton manhandled Republicans in the final weeks of Congress to extract concessions on education funding, international agencies, family planning and environmental policy.
Those concessions were possible because Republicans -- distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and confident that they would prevail in budget talks with a wounded president -- waited until the final hour to pass the spending bills needed to keep the government running. That forced them to negotiate with the White House, rather than sending up a budget of their own making.
"It almost makes you laugh," said Rep. Albert R. Wynn, a Prince George's County Democrat. "They're talking about how weak the president is, how he can't run the country? It's a joke."
Republican leaders have defended Congress' record while looking to the future, when they envision additional seats in both chambers and possibly a Republican White House, for more momentous action.
"This Congress hasn't lessened our commitment to fundamental Republican principles," said House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "In fact, time has only made it stronger, and our greatest accomplishments are yet to come."
The Republican leaders of Congress had to walk a fine line between satisfying a conservative base intent on impeachment and not alienating the many Americans who are wary of Republican intentions in Congress. That problem crippled Republican legislative initiatives all year. Conservative and moderate Republicans could not unite around any large tax cuts, major bankruptcy reforms, an overhaul of banking laws or a plan to scrap the tax code.
"Republicans needed to send a message on what we really wanted, and people back home were saying we weren't doing that," Rep. David M. McIntosh, an Indiana Republican, said after last week's budget battle was largely won by Clinton. "That would be a fair criticism for the whole year."
Starr served as a constant distraction for both the White House and Congress. As most of the Democrats' legislative agenda was being defeated, a preoccupied president exerted little or no pressure on congressional leaders.
"Had the president not been distracted, some things might well have happened," Hess said.
The marquee initiatives of the year were Democratic priorities that gained scant Republican support: landmark anti-smoking legislation, campaign finance reform and managed care reforms. All of them failed, giving Democrats resonant issues to take to the voters, especially when juxtaposed with the action Congress did take, such as the renaming of Washington National Airport for Ronald Reagan and the presidential impeachment inquiry.
"This has been the worst Congress that's ever served in the Congress," House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt fumed this week, his eye on the position of speaker of the House. "You want to change the agenda, you've got to change the leadership of this Congress."
But Republican leaders say they had to exert much of their
energy to block costly liberal initia- tives that threatened the new budget surplus.
"We are a 'do-nothing-the-liberals-like' Congress," said Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the House Republican whip.
Still, Republicans have been on the defensive, extolling the achievements of a major tax cut, the first balanced budget since 1969, and even welfare reform. The first two of those achievements actually came last year. The welfare bill was signed two years ago.
And the balanced budget deal, perhaps the hallmark of Republican control of Congress, has been chipped away by this week's spending deal. The $500 billion in the spending agreement for 1999 includes $20 billion in "emergency spending" that will come out of the expected $71 billion budget surplus. Both parties had pledged that the surplus would be saved for a long-term fix for Social Security.
To be sure, Congress did approve some major laws this year. The $217.9 billion transportation bill -- the largest public works measure ever -- will be felt nationwide. The reform of the Internal Revenue Service was welcomed by voters of all political persuasions. The Senate also ratified a treaty to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
But virtually all those bills were worked out last year and were simply awaiting the attention of the full House and Senate.
Meantime, a top Republican election-year priority -- a tax cut of up to $101 billion -- went down to defeat, for which Republicans blamed the Democrats.
"The reason we didn't get more tax cuts this year is because the Democrats don't like tax cuts," said Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi.
The tax measures, however, never came up in the Senate because Republican moderates refused to go along, pleading for fiscal restraint. They also feared that Democrats would score political points by charging that the Republicans had violated Clinton's vow to save the surplus until a long-term rescue for Social Security had been approved.
Similarly, House Republicans had hoped to energize their base with a bill to scrap the federal tax code by 2000. Clinton had vowed a veto, and Republican leaders, mindful of the public's disgust with the tax system, relished the prospects. But the Senate refused to touch the measure, which was denounced by Sen. William V. Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican and chairman of the Finance Committee, as fiscally reckless because it would add uncertainty to long-term economic planning.
Efforts to streamline banking laws and lower the legal barriers separating banking, securities and insurance industries collapsed, in part because of disagreements among three Republican constituencies: small banks, large financial firms and credit unions.
Democrats torpedoed other Republican initiatives, such as a ban on certain late-term abortions, a bill to bar the transport of minors across state lines to evade curbs on abortion, accelerated deployment of a national missile defense system, and a sweeping overhaul of federal bankruptcy laws to make it harder for consumers to walk away from debts.
Knocked on his heels this week by conservative charges of capitulation, Gingrich released an extraordinary defense of the Republican record. He also portrayed the Republican-led Congress as a bulwark against a Democratic president.
"We prevented our liberal president from implementing his agenda of higher taxes, bigger government and more bureaucracy," Gingrich said. "This year alone, we blocked President Clinton's massive tax increase on tobacco users, his new, government-run health bureaucracy, his federalized child care initiative, and his $150 billion in proposed higher taxes."
Pub Date: 10/17/98