Beneath the grandiose rhetoric and compelling shifts of power that characterized last week’s Republican takeover of the House lurked the essence of last November’s midterm election.
Having seized the once-impregnable fortress of Democratic liberalism after 40 years of unbroken Democratic control, the Republican Party has forced a national debate on the role of the federal government.
As vanquished Democrats led by Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri turned over the symbolic gavel to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) last Wednesday, they contemplated the impact of the last election.
“With resignation but with resolve,” Gephardt said, “I hereby end 40 years of Democratic rule of this House. Let the great debate begin.”
That debate will turn on the elements of the GOP’s “Contract with America,” a 10-point campaign pledge-and congressional agenda-that, if enacted, would alter the size, scope and cost of the federal government.
In the “Contract with America,” the document signed by more than 300 GOP lawmakers and candidates in September, the Republicans promise “historic change (that) would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive and too easy with the public’s money.”
It is a more complicated political calculation than it appears to be.
Over two difficult years, President Clinton has discovered that being viewed as the champion of Big Government has consequences. His Republican rivals may learn that being the champions of anti-government has consequences as well.
Republicans view the federal role in an uncomplicated manner. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), Gingrich’s top lieutenant, characterizes the coming debate as “big government versus advocates of personal freedom and responsibility.”
“The role of the federal government is to defend the shores and work for a system of (criminal) justice,” Armey said. “After that, my list is a pretty short one.”
Not surprisingly, Gephardt and Clinton insist they’ve already begun to shrink the federal government, noting that there are now fewer federal workers than at any time since the Eisenhower administration.
And, Democrats maintain, they will protect the poor and working families by protecting established federal programs such as Head Start and fending off changes in tax policy (read: reduction in the capital-gains tax) they view as imminical to those groups.
Gingrich, it seems, is prepared to tinker.
In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee last week, for example, he called for a “creative and . . . cooperative” effort to transform Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly, from “a large, clunky, inefficient government system to a market-driven system.”
He has made it clear his majority will bring that approach to tax policy, welfare reform, education, regulatory policy, crime prevention and immigration.
But the political consequences of tampering with Medicare, as with Social Security, are seen as potentially so volatile they never truly have been attempted.
Gingrich has declared Social Security off limits to budget-cutters “for six to eight years,” a decision that is politically astute.
But last week, some Democrats were suggesting that a reading of the speaker’s remarks indicated his support for privatizing Medicare-a suggestion freighted with political danger for Republicans.
Many Americans are enthused about generalized attacks on “waste, fraud and abuse” in Washington. According to public opinion polls, they hold the federal bureaucracy in low regard and believe the government spends too much of their money on public assistance and foreign aid.
But while the midterm election results confirmed the public’s deep antipathy toward the federal government-as well as toward the Democratic Party-it is unclear how much government the American people are prepared to do without, and how much power they wish to cede back to state and local governments.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Friday indicated that the public generally endorses the stated goals of the victorious Republicans.
But when asked what issues were “absolutely critical,” 55 percent of those surveyed cited deficit reduction and 45 percent pointed to health-care reform-neither a tenet of the “Contract with America.”
More than 40 percent of those asked saw a balanced budget amendment as “absolutely critical,” but other elements of the contract designed to restructure government-term limits, a line item veto, even cuts in welfare spending-were seen as essential by fewer than 30 percent.
Bent on cutting taxes, Republicans have vowed to go public with their list of federal spending cuts to pay for that tax relief within 30 days.
On Friday, Armey was quick to offer a partial list of federal programs he is prepared to terminate, including the Departments of Education and Energy, the Small Business Administration, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.
Few Republicans in Congress would redirect fire from any one of Armey’s targets. But the fact remains that “zeroing-out” the budget of every one of those programs would not make a sizable dent in a federal budget where six cents of every dime is committed to entitlements-Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, veteran’s benefits, agricultural subsidies and interest on the national debt.
The most compelling target of opportunity for the ascendant Republicans-welfare outlays plus food stamps-constitutes less than 3 percent of the federal budget.
To govern is to choose, and glum Democrats take solace in the fact that it is now the Republicans who will have to bear the weight, to enumerate the spending cuts, to inform their constituents what the federal government is no longer prepared to do.
Already, inside the halls of Congress, the new GOP majority is bumping up against the institutional power of the federal bureacracy to protect itself.
While they successfully passed a series of eight internal rule changes last week, Gingrich has encountered GOP resistance to eliminating some congressional committees, in part because the Republican members now chairing them want them preserved.
And it is worth noting that as Clinton attempted to recast himself as a leader last week, he declared a truce with victorious Republicans, then suggested he would seek an increase in the minimum wage, which is certain to draw intense GOP opposition.
