For the first time in 12 years both political branches are fully controlled by the same party. And comity reigns and the president rules, right? Not quite.
The year culminated with a kind of crescendo, part Wagner and part Gilbert and Sullivan, with the NAFTA vote auction, when Republicans rescued the president from the defeat, at the hands of Democrats, of the key item on his international agenda. This was a fitting finale to a year that began With the president the commander in chief, mind–trying to impose a new policy concerning homosexuals in the military, only to find that a Georgia Democrat, Sam Nunn, had other ideas and the power to prevail.
Next, the cohesiveness of Senate Republicans stopped the president’s “stimulus” package. Later, Democratic defections turned the vote on his budget into a demonstration of how little inclined congressional Democrats are to defer to him. His pet project’ a BTU tax, was killed by a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, David Boren. Then a Democratic senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, cast the deciding vote for the president’s plan, but disdainfully, explaining how inadequate the plan was.
Part of the original plan had been a freeze on civil service pay. But government employees are one of the Democratic Party’s core constituencies and they are spread across the country like marmalade on a muffin, in all 435 congressional districts. So Congress, by various technical tricks, has made sure that 80 percent of federal white collar workers will get raises of from 3 to 12 percent. Thus does the party of government go about the “reinvention” of government.
Speaking of which, the Congressional Budget Office has told the president to remove a comma from his prediction of savings. When he offered plans for implementing 40 of the vice president’s “reinvention” ideas, he said they would save $5.9 billion over five years, and $9.1 billion over six. The CBO says the net saving over five years would be only $305 million. Should you believe the president, or the CBO’s calculation that he overstated the savings by 1,834 percent? Recall this moment from his budget address to Congress:
“The budget plan…will by 1997 cut 8140 billion in that year alone from the deficit, a real spending cut, a real revenue increase, a real deficit reduction, using the independent numbers of the Congressional Budget Office. [Laughter] Well you can laugh, my fellow Republicans, but I’ll point out that the Congressional Budget Office was normally more conservative in what was going to happen and closer to right than previous presidents have been.”
Perhaps the president was bowing in advance to the inevitable–to, that is, congressional pre-eminence–when, introducing his pride and joy, his health care reform plan, he said he had “no pride of authorship.” He’d better not have.
Public enthusiasm for the plan is evaporating, partly because the chairman of the Senate’s tax-writing Finance Committee, a New York Democrat, Pat Moynihan, has dismissed as “a fantasy” the president’s proposals for financing the plan. Furthermore, it is unlikely that in this era of deepening distrust of government, Congress, obedient to the president’s wishes, will tug its forelock and approve an employer mandate that would devour jobs, or the suffocation of consumer sovereignty by a requirement that everyone buy medical insurance from a monopolistic state-run purchasing alliance.
“‘And the president destroys Medicare, destroys Medicaid, destroys the private insurance industry as we know it, and creates these complex, mammoth new state bureaucracies called ‘alliances’.” Who said that? A crabby Republican? One of those insurance industry ads that make the president’s wife so cross? No, the chairman of the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, Californian Pete Stark, a Democrat.
Of course, the president still says the government must retrench. The public regards such talk the way Jane Austen regarded the similar avowals of Elizabeth Elliot and her father in “Persuasion.” Discovering a need to economize, he asks her, “Does it occur to you that there is any one article in which we can retrench?” Austen wrote:
“Elizabeth, to do her justice, had, in the first ardor of female alarm, set seriously to think what could be done, and had finally proposed these two branches of economy: to cut off some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new-furnishing the drawing-room; to which expedients she afterwards added the happy thought of their taking no present down to Anne, as had been the usual yearly custom. But these measures, however good in themselves, were insufficient for the real extent of the evil…they were neither of them able to devise any means of lessening their expenses without compromising their dignity, or relinquishing their comforts in a way not to be borne.”
Actually, although it is still wise to count your spoons after certain members of Congress have supped at your table, Congress nowadays is more circumspect than the president is about confiscating the citizenry’s property. Last August the president, courting support for his budget, promised to support additional broad spending cuts. But last week be frantically fought proposals by Reps. Tim Penny (Democrat of Minnesota) and John Kasich (Republican of Ohio) and Sens. Bob Kerrey (Democrat of Nebraska) and Hank Brown (Republican of Colorado) to cut approximately $100 billion more over five years–about one cent of every federal dollar–proposals that may have had majorities behind them as this column went to press and as the president went into a frenzied full court press against them.
Furthermore, it is about even money that soon after Congress convenes in January it will disregard the president’s strenuous opposition and approve a constitutional amendment to require super-majorities (three-fifths) in both houses of Congress to approve deficit spending. Why, there may yet come a time when we can use the family silver even when Congress is in session.
