By handing the GOP a slim congressional majority–the smallest in the House in decades–the American people got the check on Bill Clinton that they seemed to want. They also got something else they wanted: a Congress that will consider only small,’ incremental programs, nothing on the order of 1995’s HillaryCare or 1995’s “Contract With America.”
Gingrich knows he can’t be the grandiose figure he was two years ago. Musing on Election Day, he said he had to “slow down and assess,” and his advisers say they will try-probably without much success-to make him more “warm and fuzzy.” The larger question is what becomes of the vast majority of Republicans who, along with Newt, survived these nasty elections. Like people who walk away from a car crash unscathed, the GOP freshmen just had a near-death experience. Only weeks ago many of them were in deep trouble. Will their resurgence embolden Republicans to stay true to tax cuts and spending curbs? Or will they be more restrained? Don’t count on it, say top Republicans. “Is there anything in Newt Gingrich’s character,” asks Gingrich press secretary Tony Blankicy, “to lead you to believe that the next two years will be uneventful?”
Gingrich himself is angry, especially about the deluge of ads against him. “The unions have succeeded in demonizing me,” he said on Election Day. But in terms of sheer partisanship, the early signs suggest a Congress that is not as ferociously divided as it was during the stormiest days of the GOP Revolution in 1005. Neither side, for example, can countenance another government shutdown, and Gingrich himself has admitted mistakes. He was too harsh, too autocratic. Gingrich now vows to be more bipartisan on Medicare and not to act without a national consensus. Still, with plenty of hard-nosed liberals and conservatives returning to power, no one should expect a Kumbaya Congress with Republicans and Democrats happily singing round the campfire.
Several issues will keep Democrats and Republicans in conflict when Newt bangs the opening gavel next January. The first is the budget. No one expects another federal shutdown, but Democrats and Republicans remain sharply divided over spending priorities. Clinton’s AmeriCorps national service program, foreign aid, job training–all face serious opposition from congressional Republicans. Though Gingrich may prove helpful to Clinton on issues like funding American peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, the speaker won’t be any he]p to the president on taxes. With their majorities intact, the GOP is vowing to push through tax cuts that are far larger than anything the president supports. Indeed, there’s no reason to expect the re-elected Republicans to be tempered when it comes to taxes–one thing that binds a party that includes pro-choice New Yorkers and evangelical Mississippians. Most of the new GOP senators are hard-edged conservative tax cutters. including Alabama’s Jeff Sessions and Sam Brownback, the Gingrichite freshman who came from behind to win a Senate seat from Kansas. And Gingrich himself remains adamant about tax cuts.
Then there’s Medicare. One way of avoiding another budget battle is to create a bipartisan commission to deal with the program which was the central issue in the 1995 showdown and the wellspring of so much acrimony on the campaign trail this fall. The commission idea would be a way of giving all sides the political cover they need to make tough but necessary cuts in entitlement spending. “I hope we can do it very quickly, right after the election,” says Sen. John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat and a pivotal centrist in the new Congress. Gingrich has been receptive to the idea, but not everyone in the GOP is signed on. “I don’t tend to like these commissions,” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told Newsweek. The Mississippian argues that such blue-ribbon panels are an “abdication” of Congress’s duty.
Another major area of disagreement is welfare. Although Congress passed-and the president signed-a historic reform of the program, many Democrats, including Clinton, have vowed to “fix” the bill, which ends welfare as a guaranteed “entitlement” for the poor. At the very least, Democrats would like to add more money for job training. Some liberals would go further. New York Rep. Charles Rangel, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, acknowledges that welfare is dead as an entitlement. “We can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he told Newsweek. Still, Rangel says he would like the bill to have a kind of semi-entitlement providing that no one would be kicked off welfare unless he was guaranteed a job–something that the current law does not do and which Republicans are sure to oppose. “I don’t want them tinkering with that bin,” Lott told Newsweek.
There will be a fight over schools, too. The Republicans are sure to press for tuition tax credits for private schools. They may feel emboldened by Clinton’s comment in the second presidential debate that he didn’t mind if local school districts enacted such programs– a remark that shocked many Democrats who expected the president to stand up against the mingling of public and private money.
Compared with spending issues like welfare and education, social matters may be even more divisive. The National Rifle Association still wants a repeal of the ban on assault weapons, but probably won’t get it. What’s more, the Democrats have a powerful new spokeswoman on gun control: Carolyn McCarthy, the New York widow whose husband was killed in an infamous shooting on the Long Island Rail Road, was just elected to the House. But Republicans think they have a winner in President Clinton’s veto of the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. Count on Congress to send the bill to Clinton once more. Smoking win also continue to split Democrats and Republicans. Though the GOP congressional committees won’t be grilling tobacco executives, Democrats–and the Clinton White House–will press the attack on teen smoking.
Nothing will be more contentious in the next Congress than ethics. With their majorities restored, the Republicans are certain to pursue the Clinton scandals. Gingrich made it a major issue in the final days of the campaign. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch has said that he wants still more hearings into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Filegate–the improper collection of more than 900 FBI hackground files, in-eluding those of prominent Republicans. Any number of committees are likely to take up the issue of foreign contributions to the Democratic National Committee. On the House side, the retirement of William Clinger, the chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee–which has jurisdiction over Filegate–won’t end the administration’s troubles. If anything, the incoming chairman, Indiana’s Dan Burton, is an even fiercer Clinton critic. And at the staff level, David Bossie, a veteran conservative activist who cut his teeth at Citizens United, a leading Clinton-bashing advocacy group, seems likely to become the committee’s chief investigator.
So the Clintonites had better get ready for more subpoenas. Congressional committees are sure to call John Huang, the DNC fund raiser at the center of the controversy surrounding the administration’s ties to the Indonesian bank called the Lippo Group. And even Clinton aides from the first term are likely to remain in the cross hairs. Webster Hubbell, currently serving a sentence in federal prison, may be asked about his connections to Huang and Lippo. And Bernard Nussbaum, the former White House counsel, who is being investigated by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, may have to appear once again before Congress to explain what he knew or didn’t know about the FBI Filegate episode–including the possibility that Mrs. Clinton was involved in hiring Craig Livingstone, a charge the First Lady has denied.
Democrats have their own ethics agenda: stay on Gingrich. Though the speaker has been cleared of a number of counts, the House ethics committee is still pursuing a number of leads, including charges that Gingrich improperly received campaign money and gifts from GOPAC, the political-action committee that the speaker once led. Other aspects of Gingrich’s conduct–from his possibly inappropriate use of military aides detailed to the speaker’s office to his accepting contributions from resident aliens–are likely to come under attack from Democrats eager to get at him.
Meanwhile, interest groups will be calling in their chits. In the past year, organized labor has poured $35 million into “voter education.” In return for their contributions, the unions are sure to try to demand legislative payback from their Democratic allies on the Hill, though it will be tough going with the GOP in control. John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO won’t plot its formal Washington agenda until later this autumn. But among the issues sure to concern labor are pension reform, health-care expansion and stymieing the expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement to include Chile. Conservative organizations from the Christian Coalition to the chamber of commerce will keep pressing their pet muses on the Hill. Business is still hot for more deregulation; religious conservatives want Congress to abolish federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Still, for Americans fed up with political rancor, there are some signs that the next Congress could be less vicious than the last. Both Democrats and Republicans are somewhat chastened by their twin de-feats-health care for the Democrats and the Contract With America for the Republicans. After the Democrats were turned out in 1994, the party’s tone became more contrite. “We learn from our mistakes,” says Democratic House Leader Dick Gephardt. His counterpart in the Senate, Tom Daschle, makes similar noises. The GOP is also being more circumspect this time out. “You’ll see the three C’s-compromise, cooperation and confrontation,” says Republican consultant Frank Luntz. “But it’s in everyone’s interest to have a lot more of the compromise and cooperation.”
It’s not that the GOP has become less conservative: it hasn’t. But it is less ambitious. In fact, neither the GOP majority nor the Democrats are likely to propose mammoth programs. Both will probably lean toward more incremental moves. The Democrats will almost certainly push for an expansion of health care to cover more uninsured children, but they’ll refrain from anything grander. Conversely, the GOP is not likely to propose anything too large. Though the GOP has nothing like a legislative plan yet, NEWSWEEK has learned that one of the first things Newt Gingrich wants to do is push the GOP “empowerment” agenda-tax credits and other Jack Kemp-style programs to help minorities. “Last time we focused too much on the dismantling of government rather than its replacement,” says a top GOP congressional aide.
The other thing that may temper Congress is the new faces who won this year. Some of the incoming players are explicitly committed to bipartisanship. Georgia’s newly elected Sen. Max Cleland has, for example, stressed his eagerness to work with Republicans. His last TV ad called on Congress to abandon its traditional arrangement of having each party sit on opposite sides of the aisle. “Let’s have everyone sit together,” Cleland said. In Maine, Republican Susan Collins stressed her bipartisan credentials, saying that she would be an independent voice in the tradition of her predecessor William Cohen and the famed Margaret Chase Smith, both of whom frequently voted with Democrats.
Many of those Gingrich allies who are returning won because they stressed their distance from the speaker. Even among more conservative members; it was virtually impossible to find a House freshman who boasted about his or her ties to the pugnacious speaker or even mentioned the Contract With America in campaign ads. And Democrats are offering gestures of conciliation, too. President Clinton’s election-night insistence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress “work together” was just one example. Lott also vowed to reach out to Democrats.
In the end, much of the shape of the new Congress may come down to personal relations, which have suffered over the past two years. Gingrich and Gephardt used to be friends who dined together with their spouses. The two lawmakers have barely spoken in the last year. And consider the Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful in the House. Last year Democrats and Republicans practically came to fisticuffs after a particularly bitter session on Medicare.
“You’re nothing but a bunch of dictators,” Democratic Rep. Sam Gibbons shouted as he stalked out of the meeting. Captured on camera, the incident became a symbol of government gridlock. Rangel, soon to be the top Democrat on the committee, is eager to cool tempers. He says that he wants to have a dinner for Ways and Means members-and their spouses, too, if that’ll help ease the tensions. “Having the wives takes some of the edge off,” he says. But after this campaign, breaking bread may not be enough to repair broken friendships.
