Guts Check

Republicans control the nation's purse for the first time in 40 years. Do they have the courage to roll back federal spending?

Carolyn Lochhead from the July 1995 issue

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The hand of government, by contrast, is nothing if not visible. Its actions are advertised by every politician. Advocating a hands-off policy seems a hard-hearted excuse to do nothing about grievous social problems. That government usually creates further problems while failing to solve the first one matters less than that it tries.

Then there is the modern secular theology of compassion, which trades in Mother Teresa's philosophy for Ted Kennedy's. While the old Catholic nun labors in the slums of Calcutta, the U.S. senator ministers to the poor from the marbled Senate offices of the Russell Building without ever getting his hands dirty.

Senatorial compassion conveys a sense of spiritual well-being not only to those who exercise it, but to those who support it. Government good works offer more than the ostensible aid they lend to the needy; they also allow people to feel good about themselves by voting for the politician who donates tax money to good causes. Like market successes, however, the policy failures that result are often hidden within the larger milieu.

Still, despite such powerful forces, the outlook is hardly all bleak for the GOP agenda. The House's success with the Contract with America--a sweeping package of tax cuts, welfare reform, tort reform, regulatory reform, and congressional reform--was without legislative precedent in modern times. Nine out of the 10 items passed, defying earlier predictions among even its supporters.

Democrats were routed so thoroughly that 58 percent of them crossed party lines to vote for the very thing they had said they despised.

The shift in the political discourse and terms of debate has been extraordinary. Democrats seem in shock. At a welfare hearing, Democratic Representative Charles Rangel of New York was amazed that GOP witness Lawrence Mead of Princeton University urged recipients to find immediate work, even at the minimum wage.

"If you're a high school dropout, you don't just pick up The New York Times and find out what jobs are out there," Rangel remonstrated. "What should [that person] do, just hit the streets?"

"Yes, exactly," Mead responded.

An energetic and unapologetic conservatism has taken over the House, not only opening debate on matters long bottled up by the old leadership, but demonstrating their extraordinary popularity, even among Democrats.

The change could hardly be more profound. Rather than Chicago Democrat Dan Rostenkowski presiding over his Ways and Means Committee fiefdom, there sits Texas conservative Bill Archer, who not only vows to "pull the income tax up by its roots," but has people believing him.

The ideological division has crystallized and sharpened. The debates reflect real struggles over very different visions. "I have a simple message for the Democrats," Archer declared as he opened the tax-cut debate. "It is not your money. It is the taxpayers' money. It does not belong to the government. It belongs to the workers who earned it."

The '60s-style protests against the changes have generated scant interest. Few even noticed when Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization of Women, got herself arrested in the Capitol Rotunda during debate on the Republican welfare bill.

Demonstrators bused in by the union-backed Philadelphia Unemployment Project tried to disrupt a welfare hearing but seemed more successful at undermining their supporters. "I do job training," shouted protester Leona Smith. "I teach job training. And there ain't no jobs." They were escorted outside, where they continued their protest on the steps mainly to reporters.

Democrats remain in a highly reactive mode. They protest every cut and defend every program, but suggest no alternative.

They offer only more job training programs that a large body of serious studies shows don't work. They reach for transparent hyperbole, comparing proposals to slow the growth of welfare spending to the Nazi Holocaust. Reductions, they said, will "savage" babies, kids, widows, pregnant women, and the elderly. Are puppies next, one has to wonder? The proposals they do offer often are variations on GOP themes, such as their insistence on workfare.

Florida Democrat Sam Gibbons, a Great Society architect, finally grew apoplectic, screaming on the House floor, "You all sit down and shut up! Sit down and shut up!"

Republicans have a potent budget weapon in hand, if they choose to use it. If the House refuses to fund a program, or cuts its spending, the matter can end there. The so-called zero-out option grows from the simple constitutional fact that both houses of Congress must approve money for the discretionary programs that Congress funds each year.

"It doesn't matter what the other chamber does, and it doesn't matter what the president does," says House Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Livingston. "You can't veto a zero."

The power is as old as the Constitution, but Democrats spent their 40-year reign in the House creating programs, not killing them. House Republicans now promise to exercise this enormous power of the purse to roll government back.

House Appropriations Chairman Lewis warns of the danger of timidity. If the GOP fails to balance the budget but manages through small cuts to anger a passel of constituencies, he says, "We could be laying the seeds of a political disaster."

California's Chris Cox, a member of the House leadership, is certain that Republicans learned from the Reagan administration's budget battles, which ultimately succeeded in eliminating just four programs and left federal spending higher than ever. "Nobody likes taking all of the heat for cutting food stamps when in fact, they are still increasing," Cox says. "If somebody is going to be criticized for spending less on food stamps, then by God, we ought to spend less on food stamps."

There is, he said, "a political calculus at work. What will dawn on every living soul in the Republican Party is that it makes no sense whatsoever to take heat for cutting spending while failing actually to do it. The irony is that the viciousness of the attacks from the left in the face of modest trimming of spending growth will in the end virtually require trenchant cuts."

The Senate GOP aide believes his party is riding a long-term rightward shift in the country. Ronald Reagan ultimately lost his budget wars, but he was at the leading edge of that shift, this strategist argues. Still, he concedes, much political residue lingers from 40 years of Democratic control.

"We are talking about huge changes, and big changes like this just don't happen overnight," he said. "Rome wasn't burned in a day." Republicans may, he says, have to regain the White House and consolidate their hold on Congress before they can fundamentally alter the direction of government.

GOP strategists are urging boldness. In a memorandum, Jeff Eisenach, a close adviser to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said the public first must be convinced that change is vital. Eisenach recommended a "burning platform" message, borrowed from the true story of a man on a burning North Sea oil rig. He jumped hundreds of feet into a freezing ocean littered with burning debris because he knew he would die if he didn't.

In his Senate office, Frist turns to a group photograph that hangs on the wall. "These are people I transplanted back two years ago," the former surgeon says. "All these people have heart transplants or lung transplants. That little baby was five days old when I transplanted him. Then some of these people here are as old as 65." He turns back from the photograph and says, "So to give that up, I need to make sure that we accomplish certain things, and if not, I shouldn't be here."

Even Frank Riggs, a political straddler from California's north coast, a district divided between those who want to cut trees and those who want to hug them, voices stoic commitment. Defeated after his first term when Clinton won in 1992, he signed the Contract last September and regained his seat in November's GOP tide.

"I've gone through what I call a political near-death experience, and it's truly emboldened and liberated me," Riggs says. "There is life after Congress, and politics should never be the be all, end all. And I believe, to my core, what Henry Hyde [the Illinois Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee] told me when I first came back here: that in politics, there are things worth losing for."

The most important thing Republican budget cutters have on their side may be the budget's own naked reality. "My hope is that when the American people are faced with the reality of the problem, they're going to decide that this has to be done," says Danforth. "We need to go directly to the public and [discuss] what it is we are doing to our children and our grandchildren and to the future of the country. We are doing something terrible."

Danforth concedes that this argument has not resonated with the public before and that it may not resonate now. "But at least we have to raise the issue," he says. "If the issue is raised clearly to the American people, then in a democracy the people decide. And if the people decide we want ours now, take care of us and forget about our children, then at least that is a conscious decision."