On the eve of the first congressional votes on President Clinton’s economic plan, Republicans dug in Wednesday against his proposed tax increases and searched for signs of dissension among Democrats.
Since Clinton unveiled his sweeping economic program last month, Republicans on Capitol Hill have moved in fits and starts to offer budgetary alternatives.
Two House votes scheduled for Thursday-one on the general budget outlines and one on Clinton’s stimulus package-will test the strength of both the president and his party’s congressional leadership.
The arithmetic of Capitol Hill, where Democrats own large majorities in the House and Senate, dictates that no budgetary option set forth by Republicans has a future.
Against that backdrop, and unsettled by the largely favorable public reception given the administration’s plan thus far, Republicans have entertained a mixed bag of strategies. In the absence of a consensus on party leadership, they have spoken in a variety of voices.
A pair of Texas supply-siders, Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. Richard Armey, have suggested that the GOP offer no alternatives to the administration’s plan, betting on eventual public discontent and a crack in what has thus far been a solid Democratic front.
“No one voted (in November) for the Clinton plan,” Gramm said Tuesday. “This is not the change Americans said they wanted.”
That belief seems to guide all Republican opinion in Congress. And all debate among Republicans seems to turn on the issue that galvanized the party of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s: taxes.
Earlier this week, a small group of House Republicans, mostly moderates, developed a budget plan that would have expanded government spending cuts and eliminated Clinton’s proposed energy tax.
However, that plan, worked up by Reps. Gerald Solomon of New York and Olympia Snowe of Maine, would have accepted Clinton’s tax increases on the wealthiest Americans.
These days, the merest insinuation of a tax increase will spark a Republican debate.
To that end, House Republicans on Wednesday adopted a resolution opposing any new taxes and all tax rate increases as a means of reducing the federal budget deficit.
“This no-taxes resolution signals a return to a basic Republican principle, and it will help bring our party back into focus after the election,” said Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), a freshman member who drafted the resolution.
With a House floor vote in the offing, House Republicans have settled on the ambitious, no-new-taxes alternative budget crafted by Rep. John Kasich of Ohio, which calls for deep cuts in federal spending designed to reduce the federal deficit by $429 billion over five years.
“We have laid a plan on the table, and it is starkly different from the Democratic plan,” Kasich said Wednesday.
His plan would go further than Clinton’s in cutting the number of federal employees, spending on housing and nutrition programs and would cut student aid while Clinton would increase it. The GOP alternative plan also would require higher-income elderly Americans to pay more for Medicare.
House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who along with Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois met with Clinton on Tuesday, hailed the Kasich budget. “It offers real deficit reduction and real spending cuts,” he said Wednesday.
Most significantly from a Republican view, the Kasich budget calls for no tax increases in its march toward deficit reduction.
The depth of feeling among congressional Republicans on the tax issue was spelled out by Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas.
“We fought with our own administration over tax increases,” DeLay said Wednesday, a reference to GOP unhappiness with the 1990 budget deal, which President George Bush endorsed. “We’re sending a message to the new administration that we will not support any increase in taxes.”
Senate Republicans will not take up the Clinton budget plan until next week, and no GOP alternatives have been forthcoming from Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas or his allies.
The cast of characters in the Senate is less colorful than in the House, with Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, a deficit hawk and the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, leading the opposition.
Domenici argues that the Clinton plan is essentially unworkable and eminently capable of being stopped. “The adoption of this economic plan in its entirety is a long, long way from a touchdown,” Domenici said Wednesday.
The first of Thursday’s scheduled votes is on a budget resolution defining the outlines of the Clinton plan, while the second will address an increasingly controversial $16.5 billion “economic stimulus package.”
That package includes funding for summer jobs, unemployment compensation and public-works projects.
Republicans in both houses are all but unanimous in their opposition to the jobs-and-spending package, and have monitored rumblings of dissent among conservative and moderate Democrats.
A Democratic group led by Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas and Sens. John Breaux of Louisiana and David Boren of Oklahoma have sought to scale back the Clinton stimulus plan.
While Thursday’s votes in the House will not carry the force of law, they will offer a telling barometer of Clinton’s strength on Capitol Hill and test the ability of the Democratic congressional leadership to enforce party discipline.
Republicans acknowledge they are limited in the ferocity of their attacks on Clinton’s program by a public that has made clear its unhappiness with the much-maligned Washington gridlock.
“Everybody has to go home and tell their constituents they worked hard to make Washington work,” a senior Democratic staffer said Wednesday. “It’s a real lever for Clinton up here on both sides of the aisle.”
However, that atmosphere doesn’t mean the budget debate on Capitol Hill, which is likely to run on until autumn, will be altogether decorous.
In an opening salvo Wednesday, Michel savaged the Clinton budget plan, calling it “well-packaged and sold to the public . . . as a Madison Avenue product.
“It’s Clinton’s all-purpose budget cleanser,” Michel said, “with lemon scent.”
