O.C. Delegation Sees Bright Side to Budget Gloom : Politics: Local congressmen don’t like the package, or Bush’s backing it, but they say it makes Republicans more determined and future tax hikes less likely.

With the bruising federal budget debate behind them, Orange County’s five conservative congressmen stepped back this week to survey the wreckage. Despite losing the battle to stave off new taxes, they are not aghast at everything they see.

True, the five Republicans believe that the final budget package, intended to reduce the federal deficit by $490 billion over five years, is a mislabeled disaster that actually will do little to cut the exponential growth of federal borrowing.

And true, the lawmakers said, President Bush is taking what they consider a deserved beating for abandoning his pledge against raising taxes, a beating that is likely to translate into GOP losses at the polls on Nov. 6.

But the triumph of the Democratic budgeteers is likely to steel the Republican President against future tax hikes, the Orange County lawmakers said. And, they asserted, it already has infused conservative Republicans with a new resolve that will render them a more potent force in the 102nd Congress, which convenes in January.

“The entire exercise has galvanized Republicans in Congress,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), whose 40th Congressional District comprises central Orange County. “Having come through this ordeal, we will be much more united now on the issue of central importance to all of us--taxes and spending.”

Cox and his colleagues--Reps. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) and Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad)--were among 126 House Republicans who voted against the final budget package as dawn broke over the Capitol on Saturday. Only 47 Republicans voted for the plan, which raises a number of taxes, including those on income, cigarettes, liquor and gasoline, and seeks to restrain increases in future federal spending. With the support of 181 Democrats, the budget was approved 228-200.

“This is nothing more than a total fraud on the American people,” said Rohrabacher, whose 42nd Congressional District includes Seal Beach, Cypress and parts of Huntington Beach. “This is a massive tax increase being masked by a deficit reduction label. In the end, there will be no deficit reduction, and we will end up with nothing more than a massive tax increase.”

The “spending cuts” included in the agreement are based on the assumption that funding for the affected programs would have increased at the rate of inflation if the accord had not been passed. As a result, some “reductions” will allow nominal increases in funding.

Similarly, the “deficit reduction” to be provided by the accord is based on the projected size of the deficit if funding for all programs had been allowed to rise with inflation and if no tax increases had been imposed.

Cox, agreeing that the deficit-reduction label is misleading, said the package contemplates increases in federal spending in the next five years of $734 billion, and tax increases of only $164 billion.

“The line that people are using right now is deficit reduction, (but) they are no longer talking about hard number, year-to-year comparisons. They’re talking about how much they’re going to cut back on their projected increases,” Cox said.

“It is disingenuous to call that a cut in spending, and the American people are being misled. . . . The bill includes almost a quarter of a trillion dollars in mandated new spending.”

Throughout the long debate on fiscal policy, congressional Democrats insisted that Republicans wanted to balance the federal budget on the backs of the poor by cutting spending for critical social programs and by proposing tax breaks for wealthier Americans.

House Democrats overwhelmingly rejected an earlier budget plan, painstakingly negotiated by congressional leaders and the White House, largely because it would have raised Medicare premiums and relied on increases in taxes they considered too regressive.

In recent days, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ron Brown has sharply criticized President Bush and his party, arguing that Democrats “were there to look out for the working men and women of this country.”

“Chutzpah to the Nth degree!” exclaimed Dornan, who represents the 38th Congressional District in north-central Orange County. Brown is “calling Bush the tax raiser. . . . The gasoline tax was Bush’s idea, to hear (Brown) tell it. . . . It’s like a mantra. He says it over and over and over.”

While Brown’s criticism is unfair, Dornan said, the President must bear a measure of blame for the final package as well as for what Dornan expects will be a net loss of as many as five GOP seats in the House. That estimate is shared by other Orange County representatives, as well as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Dornan generally is one of Bush’s most fervent congressional supporters.

When Democrats persuaded Bush to back off from his pledge of “Read my lips, no new taxes,” they “began to beat his brains out behind his back, and then pretty soon, right in front of his face. . . . They broke him,” Dornan said.

Packard, whose 43rd Congressional District includes southern Orange County, said the Democrats “were successful to a degree in painting us as protecting the rich. . . . But all you have to do is look at their (original, House-passed) tax package. That’s a humongous tax increase for lower- and middle- and upper-income people.”

The upside of the Democrats’ public relations coup, Dornan said, is that “Bush is so horribly scarred by this, I can see it in his face, that he was euchred, suckered, played for a fool, that I heard he told one of his staffers, ‘Burn me once, your fault. Burn me twice, my fault.’

“He’s going back to the ‘Read my lips’ tax theme, and he will stay with it until Election Day, 1992.”

That would be welcome news for Dannemeyer, one of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress, whose 39th District includes Fullerton, Yorba Linda and parts of Anaheim and Santa Ana.

Bush can recover from the budget debacle, Dannemeyer said, only “if the President realizes that the solution to dealing with a divided political system . . . is to move to the right rather than to the left. He can still salvage the issue for the conservatives in this country.”

Rohrabacher, however, said that Bush could easily lose the 1992 presidential election if the country heads into a recession, an event that he said could be precipitated by the recently passed tax hikes. “George Bush has suffered a major political blow and gotten nothing out of it,” he said.

However Bush handles the issue, Orange County’s congressmen agreed that the bruising that conservative Republicans took in recent days will harden them for another fight over fiscal policy when Congress reconvenes.

“When you see the majority of Republicans voting against the (budget) package, that should send some positive signals to those who took the lead in leading the revolt” against the leadership-backed deficit plan, said Packard.

Dornan was more emphatic.

“I am sick of a handful of liberal Republicans telling us in the majority . . . that we should knuckle under and be the tax raisers, pro-abortion, increased government spenders, whatever the liberal agenda is,” Dornan said.

He particularly singled out for attack Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), chairman of the House Republican Conference, who was one of only two California Republicans who voted in favor of the budget package. Rep. Bill Lowery (R-San Diego) was the second.

“There is going to be blood on the floor of our conference” when it meets in a month, Dornan said, “and I mean to lead a revolt of the majority to knock off this garbage, and we’re going to start with . . . Jerry Lewis.”

Lewis was not available for comment.

Rohrabacher agreed, and suggested that conservative Republicans eventually will complete a purge of moderate Republicans from the House leadership. “Eventually, they will lose control of the party,” he said.