High Pessimism and Frustration Haunt Congress

Congressional frustration and pessimism reached remarkable new levels Thursday as a veteran Democratic House member called publicly for Rep. Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) to step down as Speaker and one of the Senate’s most highly regarded freshmen decided to end his congressional career.

With some representatives feeling mortally wounded by the House bank scandal and others simply choosing to give up, the exodus from Congress has begun to swell.

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) became the sixth senator to announce that he would leave voluntarily, and a seventh--Alan J. Dixon of Illinois--was recently defeated in his bid for reelection. In the House, five members decided just this week not to seek reelection, bringing the total retirements to 30 for the year.

Those leaving have expressed disgust and disappointment. The members fighting to stay are angry. The mixture has fed an atmosphere darker than any in recent memory.

“We’re absolutely in gridlock and it’s frustrating,” complained one Republican, Rep. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio).

Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), a 34-year House veteran, said, “I’ve never seen partisanship the way we’ve seen it today, almost to the point of nausea.”

An increasingly common conclusion reached by members is that, with all of its personal and political problems, Congress is just not getting much done.

Several measures pushed recently by the leadership, including a proposal to shift billions of dollars in defense savings into domestic programs, were resoundingly defeated by Republicans and Democrats.

Congress has also failed to pass comprehensive bank reform legislation and a tax-cut program that President Bush would sign, and has lost every veto battle it has fought with the White House. The word paralysis is mentioned with increasing frequency in floor speeches and at press conferences.

Five-term Democrat John Bryant of Texas escalated the tension by publicly declaring what some other colleagues have been grumbling--that Foley should face up to the disaster around him and give up his leadership post at the end of this congressional session.

“For him, political leadership is painful, and political combat, even when absolutely necessary in order to present the nation with the Democratic alternative, is to be avoided, if at all possible,” Bryant said.

In a reference to the turmoil in the House bank and post office, he said, “For Speaker Foley, even management of the daily institutional operation of the House is an annoyance, making decisive management impossible.”

Bryant’s move appeared unlikely to trigger any immediate action to oust the Speaker this year, and Foley told a reporter that he intends to run for another two-year term as leader in the next Congress.

But it placed the senior, personally popular Democrat under much greater pressure and further raised the specter of an institution at war with itself.

Foley had been under fire from Republicans but had escaped public scorn from members of his own party. This week, in addition to the new public slap, several of Foley’s lieutenants in the Democratic hierarchy complained that the Speaker’s failure to crack down last fall on the casually run House bank had exposed them all to strong voter resentment.

More stunning than Bryant’s blast was the announcement by Conrad, 44, who said he would leave at the end of his first term.

A former North Dakota tax commissioner who pressed for fiscal responsibility and eschewed some of the House’s more partisan feuds, he was seen by colleagues as a member with a bright future in the Senate’s new generation.

Thursday, Conrad said he thought that he was getting little accomplished and should give up. “The budget deficit is completely out of control,” he said, noting that he had promised his constituents that he would work to reduce it. “There is only one right course . . . .”

Only last week, one of the Senate’s most distinguished Republican leaders, Sen. Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, had expressed similar frustration about congressional inertia in saying he would not seek reelection to a third six-year term.

The release this week of the names of the 22 worst abusers of the House bank, with the identification of 296 lesser offenders soon to follow, has added to the pall.

Foley, in typical understatement, said of the congressional mood: “There have been happier times, no question about it . . . . There is great frustration that the (nation’s) problems are not matched by the available resources and the possibilities of moving forward, at least to the degree that they were in previous years.”

One liberal Democrat said, however, that he saw no improvement until Foley is out.

“If this guy had any guts, he’d resign right now,” he said. “He could damage the Democratic Party for the rest of the decade because of this (bank) issue . . . . I don’t give a guy any credit for being a nice guy anymore.”