Politics / What to Filibuster Next?
Norquist, Grover G.
me how much he liked my necktie. He told me he was trained as an economist, and he quickly found that he could maximize his utility by working as a wrestler instead of an economist. "My Dad's an...
...Maybe the craft can't be fixed, but it should be back to the drawing board for the staff...
...First, as Texas Senator Phil Gramm noted, it allowed Republicans to recapture the issue on which they built their electoral successes—opposition to taxes and spending...
...An economist turned wrestler...
...Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky points out that in a $6 trillion economy with a $300 billion deficit, the saving of $16 billion in wasteful spending is not important substantively but very important symbolically...
...A female attendant wouldn't speak to me or give me dessert after I caught her snitching my souvenir Concorde briefcase and asked for it back...
...There was also a screaming little girl across the row...
...I wonder if I can sue .. . Republican filibuster stopped Clinton's momentum, forcing a detour and even a retreat...
...On landing, it got so hot that the crew had to open the catering door so we could breathe...
...Even the so-called Republican moderates in the Senate, such as Rhode Island's John Chaffee, Vermont's Jim Jeffords, Minnesota's David Durenberger, and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, find unadulterated pork-barrel deficit spending offensive...
...Byrd's technique is the functional equivalent of the "closed rule" that the 'House leadership regularly uses to R epublican leader Bob Dole's successful defense of the taxpayers against President Clinton's $16.5 billion stimulus package has convinced congressional Republicans, moderate Democrats, the business community, and the American people that the tax-andspend Blitzkrieg that appeared unstoppable after Clinton's State of the Union speech can be counterattacked...
...Todefeat the general tax package, Senate Republicans will try first to strip out the energy (Btu) tax and the tax on Social Security...
...This hurts challengers, who, unlike incumbents, do not have a federal salary of $140,000 to live on while they campaign full-time—not to mention a large staff...
...Gingrich calls the House-Senate cooperation "the best I have seen...
...While there are a couple of possibilities among Democrats, the chances of finding seven defectors to go with the forty-four Republicans (optimistically counting Kay Bailey Hutchison as the new senator from Texas) aren't good...
...The DeLay-sponsored town hall meetings on April 17 were a forum for senators as well as House members and will be repeated on June 19, in a format focusing on the entire Clinton package...
...All in all, British Air has some work to do on this airplane...
...Fortified by conversations with their constituents, not a single Republican would budge...
...A male attendant smashed his cart into my elbow and then laughed...
...The deficit-spending "stimulus" bill was dead...
...When the Senate reconvened, the White House—going around the Senate Democrats—offered a vastly scaled down compromise of $6.5 in spending, with $2.5 billion to be paid with spending cuts elsewhere...
...Then, the male flight attendant just dropped my souvenir pen on my lap while I was sleeping, laughed again, and went on his way...
...In an effort to pressure Republican moderates, President Clinton flew to Pennsylvania to publicly attack Senator Arlen Specter for not supporting his wonderful spending program, which included pork for Pennsylvania...
...Over the Easter break, House Republicans, under the leadership of Tom DeLay of Texas, organized twenty-four simultaneous "town hall" meetings to discuss the deficit spending package...
...On the other hand, you have to travel," I said...
...True, and I also have to spend about four hours a day in the gym," he added...
...A Senate staffer calculates that there have been more Republican House/Senate leadership meetings this year than in the past ten years...
...The Concorde, as everyone knows, has a small, cramped cabin, which was just fine...
...Dole was helped by a suggestion from Senator John Warner of Virginia that all forty-three Republicans send a letter to the president that put on record their opposition to a spending package that did not "pay for itself" through reduced spending elsewhere...
...Bill Zeliff, "This plan was not defeated in the Senate, but in discussions around the kitchen tables of America...
...But in fact, the Easter recess sealed the spending plan's fate...
...and using his parliamentary skill to design an "amendment tree" that effectively prohibited any meaningful amendment from getting onto the floor of the Senate...
...The loss of revenue ($102 billion) would send Clinton back to the drawing board...
...Bill Clinton quietly revoked it one January evening, after the White House communications office had announced that there would be no more news that day...
...Before Dole kept forty-three Republicans together to filibuster for twenty-three days, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that the Clinton plan was certain to pass in its entirety...
...McConnell calls the proposal "food stamps for politicians" and wonders if the American people really want to set up an entitlement program that grants politicians "vouchers for broadcast and newspaper ads, preferential mail and broadcast rates...
...In concert with the White House, unions asked their staffs to lobby Specter and other, presumably wavering Senate moderates...
...According to Gramm, who attended one of those town hall meetings in (surprise) New Hampshire with Rep...
...London to Washington, D.C., in threeand-a-half hours...
...I imagined the glamorous fellow travelers, more cultured than Alger Hiss, the movie stars, the plutocrats...
...My Dad's an ob-gyn, and I make more than he does, working twenty minutes a night...
...Failure to meet those principles would then engender a filibuster—one that might well be joined by moderate Democrats...
...Democratic dissenters who criticized the spending package have been rewarded with popular support in the press...
...The nation seems well pleased with Dole's more aggressive leadership—and we're all at least $16 billion less poor...
...Chamber of Commerce, for more than a decade the stalwart defender of Reaganomics, embraced Clinton and abandoned its traditional "no tax hike" position.' The ram legislation through without requiring Democrats to vote on amendments that might not play well back in the district...
...Second, Dole kept the party together through constant consultation with the Republican Conference, going back to members whenever the White House shifted its position...
...Boiled, tasteless chicken...
...What's he doing here...
...Even the U.S...
...This was a torpedo into Clinton campaign strategist James Carville's goal of wooing Perot-voting deficit hawks to the Democratic fold...
...The flight attendants were almost comically rude...
...Two power grabs are planned...
...True, Clinton had won only 43 percent of the national electorate, but the national media beat the drum of "mandate" and spoke dreamily of a "return to Camelot...
...he April filibuster had benefits T beyond encouraging future filibusters...
...W hen Congress broke for the Easter recess, in the middle of the filibuster, the White House was offering a reduced package of only $10 billion, with $6 billion to be paid for with promised reductions...
...These might include requirements that citizens maintain their right to choose their own hospital and doctor and that taxes not be raised...
...As Newt Gingrich points out, "It forced President Clinton onto national television virtually every night to personally be seen lobbying for more spending instead of deficit reduction...
...The Democrats maintained strong majorities in the House and Senate and they had a congressional leadership willing to demand and enforce party unity...
...The worst coach food in America is better than what we got on the Concorde...
...Because of the special rules on the budget, the filibuster weapon is denied to Dole and his party in the fight against the reconciliation bill—Clinton's general spending and tax increase program...
...What happened...
...and bonus money if one's opponent rejects the 'voluntary limits.' " The Democratic reform package leaves intact the loophole allowing unlimited use of compulsory union dues for politics—despite workers' wishes and a Supreme Court decision to the contrary...
...Three factors came together to make the filibuster succeed...
...First is the Striker Replacement bill, which would strengthen union leaders by making it illegal for struck employers to hire replacement workers...
...This reform would permanently shift the balance in favor of labor unions that today rake in an average of more than $400 per union member each year...
...In London, I had to transfer from Terminal One to Terminal Four, a distance of six miles by ancient bus, to get to the International Building...
...Senator Dole's chief of staff Sheila Burke said that members returned strengthened in their opposition to the spending package...
...DeLay reported back to his fellow House members that at two of the town hall meetings, hecklers sent by the Democratic Party to speak out in favor of the spending package came up afterwards and apologized, chagrined at what they had learned about the pork included in the spending package...
...Should both taxes survive amendment efforts, the Republican strategy will need fifty-one votes to kill the whole bill...
...The publicity given the budget proposal of Ohio Republican John Kasich, which would have cut $430 billion over five years without raising taxes, made the Clinton package look amateurish...
...George Bush had issued an executive order putting some teeth in the court's decision...
...The reality was somewhat different...
...Then I shopped, ate delicious smoked salmon, and hung out at the Concorde Lounge...
...But it also had a huge, Li'l Abner–type hillbilly in coveralls sitting in front of me...
...Finally, West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd helped forge Republican unity by dealing Oregon's Mark Hatfield, the leading Republican "budget dove," out of the process...
...This is even better than a Las Vegas publicist/columnist turned economist...
...I like it a lot...
...On the other hand, the filibuster can be applied to Hillary Clinton's attempt to nationalize the 14 percent of the economy that comprises the health-care industry...
...How can her parents afford it...
...With forty-three Republican senators," McConnell notes, "you may not have forty-one senatorstogether on a whole lot of filibusters, so it pays to pick your fights...
...stiff-arming Republicans on the Appropriations Committee...
...Iliked it a lot...
...The food service was abysmal...
...Second is a "campaign finance reform" that would limit how much a candidate for representative or senator can spend...
...Finally, the Dole-led filibuster was a cheerful reminder that good policy is good politics...
...McConnell thinks Republicans should focus on blocking those initiatives of the Democrats that would change the rules to stack the deck against Republicans...
...The plane ran out of towels, and was so hot that Pigpen in front of me took off his shirt and sat in his undershirt for the last two hours...
...Senator Gramm suggests that the Republicans could lay out a set of principles for health-care reform that any proposal would have to meet...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
