GOP Political Machine Hits Snags After a Good Start : Congress: Stumbling blocks indicate public is only willing to go so far in quest to downsize government.

Seven months after it took Capitol Hill by storm, the Republican juggernaut led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia is still rolling over pockets of resistance on its way to enacting the conservative vision of a less intrusive federal government.

Yet as Gingrich and his troops savor their latest string of floor victories before embarking on a monthlong summer recess, there is a growing sense that the Republicans are beginning to bump up against the limits of the public’s revolutionary fervor.

On issues ranging from family planning to environmental safeguards to worker protection, GOP leaders are in danger of overreaching. In recent weeks, they have been confronted with the kinds of intraparty divisions, bruising setbacks and outright defeats that were largely avoided during their halcyon first 100 days in power.

House Republicans left town on a high note Friday, after passing a bill that would slash spending for labor, health and education programs. But that could turn out to be a high watermark for conservatives, because the bill will surely be watered down in the less conservative Senate and faces a veto threat by President Clinton.

“It’s like Napoleon reaching Moscow--they are not going to get much farther,” said David Mayhew, a Yale University political scientist. “Resistance is hardening.”

A review of the current state of the GOP legislative agenda provides the best road map yet of how far the nation is--and is not--willing to go down the road to smaller government. It seems clear that most Americans want fewer government regulations, but worry when they’re told they might get rancid meat as a result; they may not lose sleep over spotted owls, but they want their clean drinking water, and they are wary of federal funding for abortion, but want to support family planning.

That ambivalence was glossed over in the Republicans’ bold reading--some say misreading--of the 1994 election as a resounding mandate to reduce the size and scope of government. Republicans are working on the risky political assumption that voters care more about the broader goal of reducing government than they do about the benefits and protections they lose in the process.

Waning Support

For that, Republicans could pay a political price. Polls indicate that the longer Republicans are in power, the less the public likes what they are doing. A Times Mirror poll in January found that far more people approved of the Republicans’ policies than disapproved, by 52% to 28%. By June, support had slipped to the point where more disapproved than approved, by a 45% to 41% margin.

And a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that the public’s disapproval of Congress jumped 10 points--from 43% to 53%--from June to August, the crucial months when Republicans laid out the details of their balanced budget plan.

The political risks get even steeper this fall, when attention turns to GOP plans to wring $270 billion in savings from Medicare, a program that--unlike the narrower programs cut in this summer’s appropriations debates--touches the lives of virtually every American.

Lawmakers will have a chance to test constituent reaction during their long August recess, which begins for the Senate at the end of this week.

In both chambers, the recess will bring an end to an intense and exhausting summer session. In recent weeks, debates stretching deep into the night became the rule rather than the exception. Partisanship came to a boil in both chambers. The rhetoric turned especially ugly in the House last week, as Republicans steamed toward passage of the labor, health and education spending bill that crystallized their legislative ambitions.

“It’s a glorious day if you’re a fascist,” shouted Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) during Thursday’s late-night debate. When an angry Rep. Robert S. Walker (R-Pa.), the presiding officer, tried to bring Miller to order, he banged the gavel so hard its head broke off.

“The gentleman embarrasses himself and the House,” Walker lectured Miller.

The round-the-clock pace matched that of the first 100 days, when GOP leaders pushed the House to vote on their entire campaign manifesto, the “contract with America.” But there the similarity ends. During the first 100 days, attention focused on the House and on issues such as the line-item veto and regulatory and welfare reforms, all of which enjoyed broad public support. Bills moved at a brisk pace and generally passed with wide bipartisan margins.

Now more attention has turned to the Senate, where the items of the contract have bogged down, and to more divisive issues such as school prayer. The legislative pace slowed to a crawl, even in the highly disciplined House, as Democrats discovered the power of delaying tactics. Despite that, House Republicans managed to win approval before the August recess of 11 of the 13 appropriations bills needed to finance the government--bills that include a big chunk of the domestic spending cuts they need to balance the budget. But in other areas, the GOP agenda has lost some of its early momentum.

Some issues have died in the face of the time-honored reluctance of politicians to cede power. Term limits died in the House, and a promised vote in the Senate has yet to materialize. The line-item veto has been passed by both the House and Senate, but now has stalled, apparently in the face of GOP reluctance to give that new power to a Democratic President.

Public Resistance

But resistance to other Republican initiatives seems to have its roots in more than institutional inertia. In some cases, it signals the limits of Americans’ willingness to forgo federal largess or regulatory protections.

Witness the fate of the Republicans’ regulatory reform bill, which would make it harder for the government to issue new health, safety and environmental regulations. Democrats have all but killed the bill in the Senate by tapping into the ambivalence of a public that wants to cut red tape, but enjoys many of the fruits of federal regulation in areas such as meat inspection and toxic waste cleanup. Senate Republicans carved out exceptions for those and other federal activities in the regulatory reform bill, but still could not garner the 60 votes needed to cut off debate and bring the issue to a vote.

“The regulatory stuff is hard to get through,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) “I don’t think there is any doubt that on those issues--health, safety, the environment--there is a definite reaction on the part of the public.”

Although the more conservative House easily passed a broad regulatory reform bill early this year, GOP leaders got an unexpected jerk on their chain when the House recently rejected an especially audacious effort to defang the Environmental Protection Agency. To be sure, the Republican leadership reversed that vote a few days later--just barely and almost by a fluke--but the close call sent a clear signal that cleaning up the nation’s water and air is one area where the public is less eager to downsize the government.

“We’re not talking about spotted owls and precious issues that only the most extreme environmentalists lose sleep over,” said Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University. “These are bread-and-butter environmental issues. People don’t want to go back to the times when the Cuyahoga River would catch fire.”

Agenda Setbacks

Conservatives may have come close to overplaying their hands on abortion during last week’s debate on the social spending bill. Emboldened by the strong anti-abortion majority brought to Congress in the last election, Republican leaders tried to wipe out federal aid for family planning, a whipping boy of anti-abortion activists who think some clinics promote abortion. Conservatives were slapped down during House debate on the bill, when a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats voted to resurrect the program.

Earlier this summer, conservatives were unexpectedly beaten back in the unlikely arena of labor policy. The House Appropriations Committee had included in a transportation spending bill a provision to eliminate collective-bargaining protections for mass-transit workers. During House debate, 44 Republicans joined Democrats in voting to strip that provision from the bill, giving a rare and surprising victory to organized labor in a Congress riddled with anti-union sentiment.

Gary Bauer, a conservative activist who heads the Family Research Council, attributes some of these setbacks to a resurgence of an older generation of Republicans--less conservative, more attached to the Washington status quo--than the rebellious breed elected in the 1990s.

“You’ve got many members who have been around for a while who did not get swept in as part of this landslide last November, and young turks who feel they have a mandate to come here and make major changes,” Bauer said. “It’s going to be a real challenge to the Speaker’s leadership in the House to keep those two sides together.”

That was the challenge Gingrich faced last Thursday when he scrambled to secure passage of the labor, health and education spending bill despite deep divisions within the GOP over abortion provisions and other issues in the legislation. It was a remarkable feat whose outcome was in doubt until the final hours of debate. Faced with solid Democratic opposition, Republicans could not afford to lose more than a dozen or so votes in their own party. Just a few hours before the vote, leadership head counts showed 40 Republicans were undecided. In the end, many of them swallowed reservations and voted for the bill--some in deference to colleagues who faced more political pressure to oppose the bill.

“If I don’t support this, some vulnerable person is going to have to,” said Rep. Rick A. Lazio (R-N.Y.).

Challenges Ahead

In the end, Gingrich prevailed on the final vote by convincing his troops that the party as a whole had more to lose politically from the defeat of the bill--a cornerstone of the GOP agenda--than lawmakers would suffer individually from voting for the bill.

That is the kind of argument GOP leaders will need to make in spades this fall, to persuade their rank and file to put aside parochial concerns about political fallout and vote for major changes in Medicare to meet the GOP target of saving $270 billion over seven years.

“We have to move members from an old political dynamic, where the push is to revert to parochial interests, to a new political dynamic to exhibit courage and fortitude,” said Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Republican Conference. “It’s going to be a tough fight.”