Politics / Crime Pays
Norquist, Grover G.
Crime Pays by Grover G. Norquist 0 n August 11, the House of Representatives voted 225-210 to defeat a rule that would have brought Bill Clinton's crime bill to the floor for a vote. The Clinton...
...If they had kept their word to Dole, a single amendment to the Senate bill would have sent it back to the House...
...For one thing, he was "amazed" to learn the depth of anti-government feeling...
...T he battle lost in the House, there was a strong possibility that the legislation could be defeated in the Senate, where sixty votes would be required to overcome objections to the revised bill's new budgetary impact...
...Two days earlier, pollster Frank Luntz had informed House Republicans that opposing the crime bill would not be politically costly...
...As the only Michigan Republican to vote for the crime bill the second time around, he was roundly booed at the state's Republican convention...
...Sixty-five percent said its gun-control provisions will have "no effect" on crime, and only 31 percent thought the bill will "help" to reduce crime...
...The promise of 100,000 police is nothing but another massive unfunded mandate: the bill provides only $14,000 for each new cop...
...On August 21, ten days after the rule was defeated, the negotiating Republicans, led by John Kasich of Ohio and Mike Castle of Delaware, cut a deal and votes were immediately held...
...Clinton's approval numbers fell by four points while he was attacking Republicans for opposing the bill...
...What's more, voters heard about the bill's essence immediately—and without any spin from the media...
...W hen the media portrayed the rule vote as a personal defeat for Clinton, the White House spun right back that after they'd broken enough fingers to switch eight votes and pass the rule, the headlines would read, "Comeback Kid Wins, Gains Momentum to Win Health Care Reform...
...Sixty-five Republicans had voted for the crime bill when it first passedoverwhelmingly—on April 22...
...And while federal tax monies alone pay for no more than 20,000 policemen, according to Scott Hodge of the Heritage Foundation, the crime bill will fund 40,000 social workers (read: Democratic precinct workers...
...President Clinton could not stand up and say there was no pork in the crime bill...
...Minority leader Bob Dole quickly gathered forty-one signatures from senators promising to oppose the bill unless twelve amendments were made...
...Across the country, 66 The American Spectator November 1994 activists who had responded to calls to fight a pork-laden phony crime bill were outraged to see it pass, largely intact, with Republican votes...
...If we had gone on recess before the final vote, it would not have passed...
...were about to win it a $10 million infusion from federal taxpayers, Republicans had Exhibit A in their campaign to paint the crime bill as a pork-barrel rip-off...
...The bill also creates a $3 billion Local Partnership Act to dispense federal largesse under a formula that rewards local governments for raising taxes...
...A second Republican said that, on returning to his district, "I learned how opposed my voters are to this bill I just voted for...
...They were believed immediately...
...Negotiations with the White House and the Democratic leadership began on August 16...
...The Clinton White House and the Democratic leadership were stunned...
...The bill will increase state taxes and property taxes for years to come...
...Fearful that individual congressmen lacked the backbone to withstand White House pressures and inducements, Republicans put together a rump of some thirty members who agreed to work together to prune back at least $3.5 billion of the social spending and fight for a series of genuine anti-crime amendments...
...The states are required to come up with an additional $28 billion in new taxesand spending to complete the funding...
...Three days after it passed the Senate, a Harris poll found that 54 percent of Americans believed that "the bill contains too much unnecessary spending on social programs and crime will not be reduced...
...While the House Democratic leadership reportedly was prepared to strip out the gun control provisions toreclaim the fifty or so anti–gun control Democrats, the White House wanted to keep gun control and fight for Republican defectors, and to reclaim some of the Black Caucus members opposed to the bill's death penalty provisions...
...Americans already knew better...
...With "a lump in his throat" and "misty eyed," he described the angry Republicans to the Detroit News as a "mob scene...
...People don't believe the federal government can do anything well or honestly...
...The unexpected victory on August 11 turned into the disappointing defeat of August 25...
...Barely 7 percent mentioned gun laws as important to crime control, and 55 percent believed Congress should wait until next year...
...A lthough Republicans won time, weakened health-care reform, and tarnished the crime bill, they also lost a critical public policy fight...
...The entire bill is an assault on federalism...
...Speaker Tom Foley could have survived the unexpectedly large loss of fifty-eight Democrat votes, but when minority leader Newt Gingrich held Republican defections to eleven, the rule for consideration of the crime bill lost by fifteen votes...
...Only 39 percent wanted a crime bill right away...
...But on August 25, three of the signatories—Danforth, Kassebaum, and Chafeedefected...
...As it was, the crime bill itself was delayed and discredited...
...The American Spectator November 1994 67...
...Its $30-billion price tag is roughly the size of three CETAs (the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act abolished by Reagan), or ten UDAGs (Urban Development Action Grant programs finally abolished in 1985...
...Any bounce Clinton expected to get from final passage of the bill was deflated by growing public disdain for this pork-barrel project...
...But nowadays, C-Span reports directly what congressmen are saying, think tanks like Heritage and Cato arm radio talk show hosts with faxes, and they in turn provide a megaphone for the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the conservative magazines...
...Recriminations within the House and Senate Republican caucus were loud and bitter...
...Gingrich nonetheless argues that Republicans won a strategic victory, costing the Clinton administration ten days in an already tight legislative schedule that it needed to spend on health care...
...Gingrich and other GOP leaders now worried that Clinton would easily regain the eleven and add eight of those initial backers to break the deadlock...
...Voters were concerned about crime, but by 57-38 percent they wanted "stronger punishment," not "social programs...
...He views the fight over the crime bill as a watershed...
...To stop the bill and prevent any renewed Clinton momentum, Gingrich worked with the eleven Republicans who had voted for the initial rule to raise the price of their support...
...A last ditch effort—crafted largely by conservative stalwart Chris Cox—to reject the negotiated $30 billion bill in favor of a pork-free, no gun-control bill failed 195-235, with a disappointing thirty Republicans voting against it...
...Twenty years ago, the Washington Post, New York Times, and Associated Press would have written that Congress had passed a crime bill, the network news would have repeated the news, and that's all the American people would have known...
...When Lamar University foolishly boasted—even before Republicans had seen the conference report—that its close ties to Jack Brooks (D-Tex...
...Fred Upton learned some lessons from the crime bill fight...
...The arguments about pork-barrel spending fell on fertile ground...
...As the Cato Institute's Steve Moore points out, the crime bill as passed represents the largest cash grant to cities since Nixon-era revenue sharing...
...Yet another GOP congressman who voted for the final bill found his office swamped with thousands of protest calls and faxes...
...The eleven staked out a position that some of the social welfare spending would have to be removed...
...Did Republicans, in fighting to stop an expenditure of $30 billion over five years derail a Hillary-Magaziner juggernaut that would have taken over 15 percent of the $6 trillion American economy...
...They had expected to lose some Democrats who could not stomach the ban on nineteen types of rifles, but expected to pick up Republican votes for what was, after all, labeled a "crime" bill...
...Gingrich was outraged that a crime bill that passed the Senate with a price tag of $22 billion and the House costing $26 billion had come out of conference at $33 billion...
...Because both parties expect the November 8 election to increase the number of Republicans in the House and Senate—and to strengthen the leverage of conservatives within the Republican ranks—the dream of nationalized health care in America will be dead for another generation...
...The bill passed 235-195, with forty-six Republican defections...
...Grover G. Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
