Two Cheers for the 104th
Tell, David
Two Cheers for the 104th Democrats insist, Republicans privately acknowledge, and the newspapers generally agree that the GOP’s 104th Congress ends in disappointment. But none of them can...
...This has to do with the budget battle of last December, of course...
...Even those Democrats who would unseat conservatism’s congressional avatars refuse to dispute its accomplishments...
...President Clinton refuses to dispute it, which is probably the most important reason he seems so likely to win a smashing reelection victory a few weeks from now...
...A welfare reform matched for significance and promise by only a handful of legislative initiatives in this century...
...And still the whole enterprise does have an air of defeat about it...
...But it did...
...So the 104th has not been a Congress of “unproductive gridlock” like its Democratic predecessor, which closed in 1994 in abject chaos, voteless on most major leadership goals...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...A crime-control measure...
...It’s true...
...And an end to Congress’s exemption from the edicts it imposes on others...
...It was a disaster born of nearsighted Republican enthusiasm...
...The line-item veto...
...But none of them can convincingly explain precisely how or why...
...All of them items in the contract...
...Major, reality-upending designs of political philosophy require careful, time-consuming means: persistent national persuasion, subsidiary victories, vetoproof majorities...
...But that was always an unfortunate choice of words, in our view...
...In this session, Republicans have once again blocked an assault on constitutional speech rights masquerading as campaign finance reform...
...We will probably not get such a president on November 5. There’s an outside chance, if the presidential election goes badly enough, that Republican turnout will be so depressed as to allow—in what should be an incumbent’s year of unusual public satisfaction— the Democratic party to sneak back into fullscale power...
...All in all, an impressive ideological—even political— triumph...
...It doesn’t work...
...A congressional majority without sufficient votes to override vetoes cannot, of course, achieve a real revolution against presidential opposition...
...And this Congress has advanced the conservative agenda in a number of important instances that did not result in a new law...
...A ban on unfunded federal mandates to the states...
...If that horror is avoided, and if conservatism is to be jump-started in the next two years or four, the Republican party will have to recover the political touch and patience that produced such a remarkable 104th Congress in the first place...
...Limited government, modern conservatism’s cri de coeur, is for the first time in 60 years a winning argument...
...They thought that by mere manipulation of existing interest groups and “coalitions” they might remake the political present in their own image...
...Very telling...
...Or a president who unambiguously shares the goal...
...We were promised a “revolution...
...The 104th Congress has begun the long overdue, market-based reform of the nation’s ludicrous farm price-support system...
...Nor is it entirely fair to complain, as so many complainers now do, especially on the right, that the past two years of congressional Gingrichism have proved a failure of ambition...
...Be that as it may...
...They have conducted a loud and serious debate about partial-birth abortion, an argument that has for the first time in living memory actually raised sufficient doubts about the morality of the nation’s pro-choice regime to change some people’s minds on the subject...
...It has passed a deregulatory telecommunications law, the first in more than 30 years...
...It never works...
...Is it, as the New York Times editorial page suggests, a matter of procedural failure...
...Still, if Speaker Gingrich’s grandiloquent promise of revolution was meant simply to imply the major advancement of that conservatism, he has delivered in spades...
...And all of them signed by the president...
...The last two years of the first Clinton administration haven’t been Bill Clinton’s at all...
...House majority leader Dick Armey claims his party has, by some accounting, accomplished “65 percent” of its ten-point program...
...Tom Daschle, the would-be Democratic Senate leader, says, “I don’t see any legislation we would attempt to undo...
...Adoption incentives and child-support enforcement provisions...
...Much of what the radicals promised in the Contract With America,” the paper of record casually announces, “did not get done...
...In bulk terms, at least, much of the contract truly is law...
...They have been Newt’s...
...Congress now dominates American politics as it hasn’t since the days of Uncle Joe Cannon...
...And “revolution” makes a poor fit with the mood and purpose of political conservatism, in any case...
...It has reduced federal spending on domestic discretionary programs below levels that existed when Democrats controlled the purse...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 5
