Bush’s Dilemma in Dealing With a Contrary Hill

George Bush was just beginning to enjoy what appeared to be one of the first big triumphs of his presidency, a breakthrough agreement with Congress on Nicaragua policy. Then along came his old friend and close adviser, White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, who publicly complained that the accord in which the President took so much pride had in fact given Congress far too much influence in foreign policy.

Instead of fading away, this surprisingly open intramural tussle reveals the central political dilemma facing the Bush presidency: The Democratic dominance of both houses of Congress means Bush must compromise to achieve his policy goals. But if he does, he surrenders important partisan political advantage.

Bush now faces another confrontation with Congress over the minimum wage--which the Democratic legislators have set higher than the President has said he would agree to. Bush has indicated he will not back down. But whatever happens with the minimum wage, the Gray flap illumines a reality that the Bush Administration will have to contend with for the rest of his term.

Bush must choose between confronting Democratic lawmakers in hopes of gaining partisan political advantage or, as with the Nicaraguan agreement, embrace a compromise to reach his policy goals.

In this case, Secretary of State James A. Baker III was the chief architect of an agreement that provides only non-military aid for the Contras, but also stipulates that aid will be discontinued next November unless the President receives letters of approval from four congressional committees, all controlled by Democrats.

Gray challenged the deal, first inside the Administration and then--when he did not prevail--in public.

Embarrassed, the White House cracked down on Gray. This punitive action seemed to put Bush at odds with those who believe Congress has too much say about foreign policy, a view held by many Bush supporters and even--not so long ago--by the President himself.

As he struggled last year for the GOP presidential nomination, Bush bitterly complained about the “chaos” produced by congressional “micromangement” of foreign policy. “You got 535 secretaries of state up there,” he declared. “The world outside observes and loses faith.”

Moreover, Bush’s “kinder and gentler” stance toward Congress comes just as Edward J. Rollins, new top gun at the Republican Campaign Committee for the House of Representatives, is gearing up to do battle in 1990 against what he calls “the imperial Congress.”

A former prizefighter, Rollins makes plain that he believes he is involved in a bare-knuckle brawl to reverse the long-term Democratic control of the House by striking hard at opposition members, from House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas down to the greenest newcomer. “I take whatever advantage I get in combat,” he says. “And we are in combat.”

The Nicaragua agreement, with its emphasis on bipartisan harmony, may blunt the point of Rollins’ attack strategy just when a House ethics committee investigation of Wright and the Senate Democrats’ partisan rejection of John G. Tower as defense secretary provided some tempting targets.

“It has been the assumption of most conservatives and most Republicans that, given the congressional highhandedness on the John Tower nomination and Jim Wright’s ethical problems, there was some political advantage to running against the Congress,” said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “But this (the Nicaragua agreement) puts us all in a difficult position.”

“Some of us have been saying this is a corrupt Congress that doesn’t represent the people,” said Gordon Jones, co-editor of “The Imperial Congress,” a new book arguing that congressional excesses have created a constitutional crisis. “Now the President is saying not only is the Congress not corrupt but ‘I can work with it.’ ”

The mandatory review of the aid package in November is “worse than a congressional veto,” said Jones. “It’s in effect a veto by one congressman.” Any of the four committee chairmen, he said, would probably be able to turn a majority of his committee against more funding.

To get around the constitutional problem and steer clear of a possible challenge in the courts, Baker and the congressional leaders spelled out Congress’ role in an informal “side letter,” rather than in the formal agreement itself.

But legal technicalities aside, the fact remains that the Contra agreement set off alarms among Republicans, particularly conservatives, who have been battling what they regard as congressional encroachment on presidential authority.

Gray himself, writing in Presidential Studies Quarterly before the Nicaragua deal, cited one of the basic principles Bush campaigned on was the need to “maintain and indeed strengthen the position of the President vis-a-vis the rapacious, fragmented and omnivorous Congress, which has got its hands out for everything.”

Similarly, Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney, in a paper he prepared while a Republican congressman from Wyoming, decried “congressional overreaching.”

Political fund-raiser Richard A. Viguerie, chairman of a new group called United Conservatives of America, dismissed the Nicaraguan agreement as “a surrender.” He likened it to the moderate strategy that he blames for Bush’s poor showing in the polls early in last year’s presidential campaign. “When Republicans want to win,” he said, “they go on the attack.”

On the other side, some analysts argue that a President cannot afford to be relentlessly combative if he is to manage the nation’s business.

“A smart President is going to have to realize that unless you make some deals with the Congress, you are not going to get anything done in foreign policy,” said Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

Bush seems to agree, at least in the case of Nicaragua. Defending his willingness to accept nonlethal aid to the Contras while forgoing military aid, the President recently told reporters there was not “a snowball’s chance in hell” of getting Congress to approve more military aid.

Working for Bush is the fact that most Republicans realize aid to the Contras has never had much grass-roots support and the bipartisan pact offers a graceful way out of a difficult predicament.

Thus even as militant a conservative as Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, newly elected House Republican whip, quickly gave his blessing to the Nicaragua deal. But Gingrich conceded there is a conflict between the agreement’s potent role for Congress and Republicans’ rhetorical attacks on Congress, of which he is a leading exponent. “There is no question there is a contradiction,” he admitted.

But in this case, he said, the substance of the agreement--which he called “the best deal” the Administration could get--was more important. Besides, Gingrich contended, the political debate over excessive congressional power is just beginning. “I am sure the left-wing Democrats will give us multiple opportunities to fight on the issue of their attempts to encroach on the President’s authority in foreign policy,” he said.