Fissures Emerge Within GOP Over ‘Contract’

The opening bell of the 104th Congress will not ring for another six weeks, but Capitol Hill’s bookmakers have already reached one conclusion about the odds that the House Republicans’ ambitious “contract with America” will be enacted into law:

When it comes to political contracts, not all promises are created equal.

The 10-point contract commits House Republicans to a series of up-or-down floor votes on a wide range of tax cuts, spending reductions, welfare reforms and constitutional changes in the first 100 days of the new legislative session.

Drafted by likely incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and endorsed by many GOP lawmakers, the contract contains much that Republicans agree on. But it is also studded with a number of provisions on which there is anything but a consensus within GOP ranks.

Already, some Republicans are talking privately about trying to split the contract’s agenda into two parts.

“First, there are the things that we really need to try to pass and get enacted into law with (President) Clinton’s signature,” said a senior Republican source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “And then there are the things that we need to vote for, but that some of us won’t be terribly upset to see the Democrats kill, or Clinton veto, so they can take blame for it.”

A constitutional balanced-budget amendment, the line-item presidential veto, welfare reform and some mix of tax cuts are clearly in the first category of what Republicans regard as must-pass legislation. Although it is not in the contract, voluntary school prayer is another highly popular item that the Republicans promise to push early.

The new GOP committee chairmen, who face the delicate task of reconciling intraparty differences with the rest of the agenda, will determine which initiatives are shifted to the second category: too hot to handle on a fast track.

One provision that clearly seems headed in that direction is a limit on how many congressional terms members of Congress may serve.

“The Republicans face a real dilemma over term limits,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “Most of them don’t really want to limit their terms, but on the other hand, many Republicans made term limits a top issue in their campaigns, and it is one of the most popular issues that they endorsed.”

The new GOP leadership in the House discounts these emerging fissures by noting that Republicans will have no choice but to support the contract’s main themes if they want to remain in the majority two years from now.

“If we don’t make good on the contract . . . if we just conduct ourselves around here like it’s business as usual, then we will meet with the same demise that the Democrats met this time,” warned Rep. Jim Nussle (R-Iowa), who heads the House GOP transition team.

“A contract is a contract,” said William Schneider, a political analyst with the American Enterprise Institute. “The voters have delivered on their end of it,” he said, and Republicans “must at least now make a sincere effort to carry out their promises.”

Asked if Republicans would support a constitutional amendment to limit their terms now that they were in the majority, Gingrich noted that the GOP contract promised only to put the issue to a vote. It does not, he said, commit members to vote for limits.

And even if a constitutional amendment achieved the necessary two-thirds majority in the House, it would be unlikely to do so in the Senate, where the Republicans’ partisan advantage is only 53 to 47.

“I’m not sure that term limits will pass the House, but if it does, there are a lot of us who will have voted for it on the assumption that the Senate will save us,” a senior GOP lawmaker said.

Democrats, still nursing their wounds from the electoral drubbing that will put Republicans in charge of both the House and Senate for the first time in four decades, plan to exploit any such divisions in the GOP ranks.

“Like we did before them, the Republicans are about to learn that keeping a promise is often a lot harder than breaking it,” said a senior Democratic House aide.

“Everyone agrees that we have to fulfill the contract because we will have set ourselves up for a major political fall in two years if we don’t pass it,” said a senior House GOP aide.

Virtually all Republicans, for instance, are on record as supporting tax reductions. But the specific cuts called for by the contract do not enjoy universal backing.

GOP deficit hawks are arguing privately that the arithmetic of passing a capital gains tax cut, enacting a $500-per-child tax credit for families and repealing the “marriage penalty” in the existing tax code simply does not square with the GOP’s promise to increase defense spending and a congressional commitment to keep the federal budget deficit under control.

Similarly, there is broad support within Republican ranks for education reform. But the incoming GOP chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee has already declared himself to be strongly opposed to the contract’s key proposal for school vouchers that students could use to buy education at public or private schools of their choice.

Sharp differences are also emerging over the GOP leadership’s plan to reorganize and reduce the number of congressional committees and cut back the size of committee staffs by at least one-third.

The Republicans are committed in principle to streamlining the congressional bureaucracy, but a number of incoming GOP committee chairmen are chagrined that their new fiefdoms are about to be shrunk even before they get the keys to the castle.

Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.), the likely chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has indicated he will fight plans to sharply narrow his jurisdiction. A source close to the transition efforts conceded that GOP resistance could force Gingrich to settle for more modest changes.

Still, the pledge to reorganize and shrink Congress will probably prove easier to keep than some of the other promises outlined in the contract.

A pledge to bar U.S. troops from participating in U.N. peacekeeping missions that are not under American command is expected to run into opposition from Republicans on both sides of the Capitol.

Campaign-finance reform faces its own set of hurdles. In the last two years of the George Bush Administration, Democrats pushed through their version of reform legislation, safe in the knowledge that Bush would veto it.

In the last Congress, a weaker version of the same bill had a much tougher time passing because House Democrats knew that Clinton would not veto it. In the end, many Democrats reluctantly voted for a bill that they secretly hoped Senate Republicans would kill, which they did.

Now Senate Republicans, who did not sign the contract, might perform the same service in the new GOP-dominated Congress.

The composition of the GOP transition teams illustrates the differences between the House and Senate. The House team includes eight incoming freshmen who embraced the contract and campaigned for radical change; the three-member Senate team is composed of lawmakers with nearly 35 years of Senate service among them.

“We want to have a coordinated and coherent legislative strategy,” said Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), the leader of the Senate team, adding that the Senate might not endorse every item in the House GOP agenda.

“Our rules are different here in the Senate than they are in the House . . . ,” he said. “And on some of the issues, welfare reform for example, we don’t all agree.”

Senate Republicans support tax cuts, added Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.), but they do not necessarily embrace all those enumerated in the House contract because “we also want to be responsible. . . . We don’t want to increase the deficit and we want to cut spending at the same time.”

‘Contract With America’

* The full text of the Republican “contract with America” is available on the TimesLink on-line service. Also available are biographies of Newt Gingrich and up-and-coming GOP leaders. Sign on and click “Special Reports” in the Nation & World section.

Details on Times electronic services, A4