A Legacy of Monumental Changes : Congress Finishes ‘Productive’ Term

The 99th Congress adjourned Saturday night, leaving as its legacy a number of monumental changes in American foreign and domestic policy, including many steps undertaken over the objections of President Reagan.

Revision of the nation’s immigration laws, a massive overhaul of the U.S. tax code, a reordering of national spending priorities, a slowdown in Reagan’s military buildup, economic sanctions against South Africa, aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras, and expansion of the program for toxic waste cleanup were the chief accomplishments of the Congress over the last two years.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) summed it up as a “productive” session, even though little progress was made toward the top priority he had set for Congress on the first day of the session--slashing the federal deficit.

Triumphs for Reagan

While tax revision and aid to the contras were clearly triumphs for Reagan, most of the other measures enacted since January, 1985, reflected a conscious decision on the part of congressional leaders in both parties to take the initiative themselves. After almost single-handedly setting the national agenda in the first four years of his presidency, Reagan now must defer frequently to Congress.

Even Reagan loyalists such as Dole and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, were often at odds with the President. Dole and other Republicans took up the drive for deficit reduction when Reagan refused to lead the way; Lugar forced changes in the Administration’s foreign policy, most notably when he led the battle to override the President’s veto of sanctions against South Africa.

Partisans such as House Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-Tex.) viewed these developments as a repudiation of the President. “He just hasn’t led vigorously,” Wright said. “He has drifted--has let the economy drift--and he has let the trade deficit drift. We felt it was our responsibility to move ahead with initiatives.”

But Lugar contended it was Reagan himself who invited increased congressional participation in these matters, beginning with his request early last year for lawmakers to be represented at the U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations in Geneva.

‘He’s Not a Lame Duck’

Indeed, even as they were rewriting Administration policies, the lawmakers acknowledged that Reagan’s enormous popularity would almost always prevent him from being steamrollered by Congress. They noted that the President’s stalwart personality had kept Congress from raising taxes, which he opposed, and his tireless lobbying on important occasions succeeded in salvaging some legislative cliffhangers such as his arms sale to Saudi Arabia.

“He’s not a lame duck,” Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey) said.

As often occurs, the actions of the 99th Congress were shaped largely by the individual ambitions of its leaders. As majority leader, Dole frequently used the position to push a conservative agenda that could increase his chances of winning the 1988 GOP presidential nomination. Lugar, after losing the leader’s job to Dole, threw himself into reviving a Senate Foreign Relations Committee that had been virtually moribund since the end of the Vietnam War.

With the retirement on Saturday of House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.), an unabashed liberal and his party’s chief spokesman in the Reagan era, leadership of the Democratic-controlled House will pass from the liberal Northeast to the conservative Southwest as Wright unofficially assumes the Speaker’s role.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) has gained a reputation as the Democrats’ chief economic guru for his role in development of tax revision.

With party control of the Senate to be decided in the coming Nov. 4 elections and control of the White House up for grabs in 1988, it was not surprising that the 99th Congress was often torn by partisanship. The party squabbling began with a protracted battle in the House over the rightful winner of an Indiana congressional seat and concluded with the parties’ blaming one another for Reagan’s failure to achieve an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

Democratic Soapbox

“The House of Representatives served as the soapbox for Democratic criticism of President Reagan,” complained House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.). Similarly, Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), chairman of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, accused Dole of using the Senate agenda as his exclusive tool for the reelection of Republican senators.

Party leaders on both sides of the aisle expressed disappointment that they had failed to cut the federal deficit, even though they claimed credit for trimming spending by more than 2% in the current fiscal year. “We have held down spending very significantly,” said House Budget Committee Chairman William H. Gray III (D-Pa.).

Lying on the lawmakers’ desks on the final day of the session was a monument to the intractability of the fiscal crisis: an 18-pound, 1,200-page omnibus bill funding every government agency for the rest of the 1987 fiscal year. The bill, signed into law on Saturday by Reagan, marked the first time that Congress had not succeeded in separately funding any of the agencies of government before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1.

The embarrassment brought on by this crisis atmosphere decision-making prompted many calls for a complete review next year of the existing congressional budget process, which was last revised in the early 1970s. “Frankly, it hasn’t saved us one dime,” Michel said.

At the same time, Gramm-Rudman, the landmark deficit-reduction legislation named for its authors, Republican Sens. Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, was a shambles less than a year after being embraced by both parties as the key to solving the nation’s fiscal problems.

“One could assume that the eulogy and benediction have been given to Gramm-Rudman,” Gray said. “We haven’t done the burial yet, but you can assume that will be done next year.”

The key to Gramm-Rudman was its threat of deep and painful spending cuts--both in Reagan’s defense buildup and in popular domestic programs dear to Congress--that would occur automatically if the two sides could not agree on budgets that would meet its deficit targets leading to a balanced budget in five years.

But the Supreme Court took away much of the force of Gramm-Rudman last summer, ruling that the automatic-cut mechanism was unconstitutional. And once compliance with the law became voluntary, even though Congress and the White House pledged to meet Gramm-Rudman’s guidelines on paper, they accomplished it only through a series of accounting gimmicks and one-time windfalls that did not break the cycle of deficit-spending.

“When you strip out the smoke and mirrors, we end up with $4 billion in savings from a $180-billion deficit,” said Florida Sen. Lawton Chiles, the Senate Budget Committee’s ranking Democrat, referring to the projected deficit for fiscal 1987. “Not very much. Not enough.”

What Congress did accomplish on the spending front was a reversal of the priorities that had been set into law by Reagan during his first term. With public opinion clearly on their side, lawmakers trimmed the Pentagon’s line of credit. Actual spending on the military will continue to grow significantly over the next few years, however, because of long-term commitments that were made earlier in the Reagan Administration.

The biggest setback for Reagan’s defense buildup was the decision of Congress last year to limit deployment of the MX missile to no more than 50, unless the Administration comes up with a better basing mode than the existing Minuteman silos. And while funding for the President’s “Star Wars” space-based nuclear defense system rose sharply to $3.5 billion in the current fiscal year, it was much less than the White House wanted to spend and appeared to be gaining more opponents.

Fiscal pressures on Pentagon spending were so enormous that retiring Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) predicted they would eventually erase the impact of the early Reagan defense buildup and return the nation to “the irresponsible policies of the late 1970s.”

At the same time, lawmakers lost patience with Reagan’s constant demands for cuts in domestic programs. While the President wanted more than 40 social programs eliminated during the current fiscal year, Congress actually ended only one of them: general revenue-sharing, the no-strings-attached grants to local governments.

With the fiscal crunch still unresolved, many members predicted that the 100th Congress would succeed in forcing Reagan to accept the unacceptable--higher taxes. “You can’t do it simply the way we’re doing, which is nibble here, nibble there,” Gray said.

Although the inspiration for tax revision came from members of Congress such as Bradley and Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), there was no particular enthusiasm for the legislation on Capitol Hill until Reagan declared it his chief domestic priority. When Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) took over chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee in early 1985, he declared: “I sort of like the tax code the way it is.”

And while the tax bill was pronounced dead several times, lawmakers never forgot Reagan’s threat that he was prepared to blame them for denying tax fairness to middle-class Americans.

What resulted was the most sweeping revision of the tax code in 50 years--a bill that lowers overall tax rates by eliminating many popular deductions, cuts the tax burden for four out of five households and shifts $120 billion in taxes from individuals to businesses over the next five years.

Likewise, it was Reagan’s persistence that won him $100 million in aid to the contras, and achieved broader congressional approval for the so-called Reagan Doctrine--his pledge to assist anti-communist insurgents around the globe.

It was the first time in three years that Congress had approved military aid for contras, and it opened the way for renewed CIA involvement in the Central American war. After more than a decade, it appeared that Congress was beginning to lose its lingering post-Vietnam fears about U.S. intervention in the Third World.

What persuaded many skeptics to support aid for contras was an abiding fear that Reagan might otherwise blame them for a failure of U.S. policy in Central America. It did not reflect a groundswell of support for what most lawmakers still see as an ill-prepared rebel band.

Despite the President’s hard-fought victory to aid the contras, it was Congress--not the White House--that often appeared to be in control of American foreign policy over the last two years.

Perhaps the best example was the role individual lawmakers played in forcing Philippines President Ferdinand E. Marcos to step down while Reagan was still supporting him. Lugar went to Manila and declared Marcos’ reelection fraudulent; Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-Nev.) convinced Marcos in a telephone call that his days were numbered.

A Glaring Exception

While Reagan ultimately came around to Congress’ view on many disputed foreign policy matters, as he finally did with the ouster of Marcos, there was one glaring exception to this rule: the sanctions against South Africa. The GOP-controlled Senate dealt the President his biggest reversal to date by voting overwhelmingly to override a veto of the sanctions.

“I wish we could have done it some other way, but I don’t know what other way we had,” said Lugar, a conservative Republican whose authorship of the sanctions legislation briefly made him a hero of many left-wing Democrats. “All over Africa, people are saying that this gives them hope and that is precisely why we had to do it.”

In similar fashion, liberal Democrats in Congress sought to force Reagan into an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union by pressing legislation that called for a nuclear test ban and continued U.S. adherence to the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. But the President stunned them with his surprise summit meeting in Iceland last weekend, and the liberals were forced to delay an arms control confrontation with Reagan until next year.

Two of the 99th Congress’ biggest achievements--immigration revision and reauthorization of the Superfund for toxic waste cleanup--passed in the final hours of the session despite the declared objections of the President and his advisers. In the end, Reagan was persuaded by the Republican leadership to sign the Superfund bill and he is expected to sign the immigration legislation.

The President initially objected to the $9-billion Superfund package because it creates a new broad-based tax on corporations and increases existing levies on the oil industry. He also expressed reservations about some of the anti-discrimination safeguards in the immigration bill, which was the product of more than a decade of congressional indecision over how to deal with the nation’s ever-increasing population of illegal aliens.

Farm and trade policies were the focus of much partisan wrangling over the last two years. Democrats persistently blamed the Administration for failure to aid the ailing economies of the nation’s agricultural and industrial regions.

Congress rushed in last year to throw a lifeline to the nation’s farmers, forcing Reagan in the final days of the 1985 session to accept a measure offering $52 billion in price and income supports over the next three years--even though the President had pledged to get the government out of the business of artificially propping up the farm economy.

By 1986, however, the lawmakers concluded that the government could not afford an expensive agriculture program in a time of burgeoning deficits. “There is no question that issue is going to be revisited next year,” Panetta said.

And despite hours of floor speeches decrying the unfair nature of foreign competition, Congress made no progress on that front. The nation’s record trade deficit increased by $50 billion during the 99th Congress and is expected to reach a record $170 billion in 1986.

Although both chambers passed a bill that would have restricted textile imports, it was vetoed by Reagan and the House failed to override it. The House also passed a broader trade bill that would have required the President to retaliate against other countries for unfair trade, but that died in the Senate.

Pressure from Congress seemed to have strengthened the Administration’s hand in its trade negotiations with other countries, however. For example, Administration officials recently negotiated agreements under which other countries will no longer infringe on U.S. patents and copyrights.

The nation’s drug problem became a hot issue in the waning days of the session, when polls showed it to be a major frustration of American voters in this election year. The result was a $1.7-billion measure that would stiffen penalties for most drug crimes, fund anti-drug programs and strengthen efforts to stop drug shipments at the borders.

In the final analysis, the 99th Congress is more likely to be remembered in the history books for taking a step that had nothing to do with legislation. It was in early 1986 that reluctant members of the Senate agreed to allow television cameras into their chamber--bringing both houses of this 199-year-old body into the electronic age.