ASHES TO ASHCROFT
BARNES, FRED
ASHES TO ASHCROFT by Fred Barnes This is the best Republicans could muster: not a principled assault on the tobacco bill, but a clever scheme to destroy the bill by ostensibly improving it. The...
...Four years ago, when Republicans, plus some Democrats, discovered that the Clinton health plan had lost favor with the public, they turned on it brutally, and it died...
...Worse still, Coverdell threw in school vouchers for kids in drug-infested and high-crime areas—money to go to private or religious schools...
...There are more killer amendments on the way...
...The foes had another tactic: delay...
...It would beef up the anti-drug programs of the federal government, absorbing roughly one-third of the money otherwise allocated to anti-tobacco programs...
...There was worse from the standpoint of the bill's supporters...
...Louis about tobacco legislation and found mostly indifference...
...But the opponents dragged out the debate, spotlighting issues like the cost of the bill, the regressive taxes, the lavish fees for trial lawyers, the limits on liability for the tobacco companies but not for companies that manufacture, say, medical devices...
...Among potential Republican presidential candidates, he alone uses stump speeches to trash the bill...
...He pointed, for example, to study after study finding that smokers are not price sensitive...
...In 1994, Washington was the last to learn that ClintonCare had lost favor around the country...
...Delay worked, and when Democrats tried to shut off debate, they not only failed but irritated Lott...
...Coverdell wouldn't budge, and his killer amendment passed...
...On the Senate floor, Ashcroft has challenged the assumptions of the bill...
...Their weapons would be amendments designed to be as objectionable as possible to the bill's enthusiasts...
...McCain's lame response was to cite tobacco-company documents in which officials expressed fears that higher prices would curb smoking...
...They concluded the Ashcroft approach— full-throated, open opposition— wouldn't work on the Senate floor...
...It would provide billions to trial lawyers, sworn enemies of the GOP, to use against Republican candidates and to finance more lawsuits...
...Now it's time to do the same with the tobacco bill...
...The Senate Republican Policy Committee provided a fresh (and credible) estimate of how much revenue the bill would draw from the private sector: closer to $800 billion than the $500 billion projected by McCain...
...Lott initially wanted to finish work on the bill in April, then before the Memorial Day recess...
...Yet majority leader Trent Lott, like his predecessor Bob Dole on health care, favors compromise over opposition...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard...
...They accept the notion that the public is clamoring for tobacco legislation and will punish politicians who get in the way...
...They may call it a tobacco bill, but only in Washington do bad choices by free people become an excuse for a massive tax hike," he declared at the South Carolina Republican convention in May...
...These were supposed to be killer amendments, ones the White House, anti-tobacco zealots, and Senate backers of the tobacco bill would find so unpalatable the bill would have to be jettisoned...
...Coverdell's amendment was the most obnoxious of all...
...Start with this: The tobacco bill, sponsored by GOP senator John McCain of Arizona and crafted in consultation with the White House, is the worst major policy proposal since Clinton's healthcare initiative in 1993...
...Given all the unattractive features of the bill, might a principled attack have been more effective...
...Clinton and the bill's supporters gulped, then decided to go ahead with the measure in spite of the conservative modifications...
...And voters, in a survey by Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, said drugs (39 percent), gangs (16 percent), alcohol (9 percent), reckless driving (9 percent), and sex (7 percent) are bigger sources of worry about teenagers than smoking (2 percent...
...Thus GOP foes of the bill chose subterfuge...
...The Customs Service would be allowed to ignore a collective-bargaining agreement with a government employees' union and deploy its agents wherever it wanted...
...But even if they succeed and the bill dies, Republicans won't be seen as profiles in courage in the tobacco debate...
...Now, as James Bowman notes in the New Criterion, "the anti-tobacco frenzy seems largely confined to politics and the media, where it has taken on a life of its own...
...Ashcroft thinks so...
...McCain pleaded with Coverdell to drop the Customs and voucher provisions...
...In early June, a Washington Post reporter questioned people in St...
...The backhanded effort, pursued by a half-dozen conservative Republican senators, worked brilliantly— up to a point...
...But in the end, the killer amendments didn't kill...
...In fact, it's similar...
...Rather, they'd need to pretend to be interested in improving the bill, while actually aiming to drive several stakes through its heart...
...It's social engineering by Washington with higher taxes, more bureaucracy, and less personal responsibility...
...Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina joked that swallowing a June bug that flies into your mouth as you're riding a motorcycle at 60 miles per hour is better than swallowing one after examining it in a glass jar for two weeks...
...Ashcroft believes the analogy with Clinton's health-care bill is still apt...
...Then, to his surprise, the bill's backers said they still wanted to pass it, figuring they'd have a chance to straighten it out in a Senate-House conference later this year...
...And most Republicans—with the notable exception of John Ashcroft of Missouri—are afraid to take on the bill frontally, if at all...
...After Ashcroft's lone "no" vote failed to prevent the bill from clearing the Commerce Committee 19-1, six anti-tobacco-bill Republicans—Phil Gramm of Texas, Pete Domenici of New Mexico, Larry Craig of Idaho, Paul Coverdell of Georgia, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and Ashcroft—conferred...
...They managed to modify the legislation in two significant ways: by funding antidrug programs, and by earmarking dollars to eliminate the marriage penalty in federal taxation (both measures passed the Senate by narrow majorities...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 40
