GOP Changes Held in Check by Earlier Revolutionaries

Back in January, they swept into the Capitol like a conquering army.

With Republican majorities controlling both houses of Congress for the first time since 1955 and the “contract with America” before them like a pillar of fire, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans looked like the vanguard of an unstoppable revolution.

Twelve months later, the “Republican revolution” has been slowed and on some fronts stopped dead, ambushed not by resurgent liberals but by conservatives--by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, by John Jay and Robert Morris.

When the judgment of history is handed down, 1995 may be seen as a monument not to the triumph of conservative ideology but to the enduring principles of the Founding Fathers.

As congressional Republicans’ first year in power draws to a close, they can rightly claim to have brought about major changes, both in the thrust of domestic policy--including the federal budget--and in the operating culture of Congress.

To a degree almost without precedent in the country’s history, the GOP majority displaced the president as the originator of national policy proposals. Gingrich and his lieutenants seized the initiative so completely on economic policy, Medicare, welfare reform and a host of other issues that official Washington wondered for months if President Clinton had become irrelevant.

And, with a level of discipline not seen in decades, the onrushing Republicans shouldered aside both the befuddled Democrats and the time-honored system of legislative customs and procedures. Dispensing with the slowpoke process of congressional hearings and committee work, they went straight to the appropriations process and used purse-string fiat to proclaim their blueprint for change.

Yet in the end, they could not sweep aside the designs of the 18th century conservatives who wrote the Constitution.

Perhaps the most cautious band ever to launch a great revolution, the men who led the War of Independence and framed the Constitution craved stability above all things. They feared the quick decisions and sudden changes of course that can result from surges of political power--including tidal waves of popular sentiment, such as the one that created the Republican majorities in 1994.

A Slow Process

Abrupt change could lead to factions, they believed, and contending factions were as great a threat to individual freedoms as were tyrannical kings.

“Madison and the others envisioned the government working very slowly,” said constitutional specialist John Alexander of the University of Cincinnati. “They tried to build a system not for speed but for endurance.”

In that regard, as in some others, Gingrich and his supporters are a far different kind of conservative from Madison and other Federalists. Echoing one of the oldest and most fundamental points of controversy in American history, the federalists favored a strong national government while Gingrich and company have sought to strip down the federal government and give maximum authority to the states.

And, where the founders labored to discourage rapid change, Gingrich and other GOP conservatives have made drastic change their battle cry. The “contract with America,” the emphasis on the first 100 days, the end-of-the-year determination to prevail on the budget. In these ways and more, the new conservatives have fought to change as much as they could as fast as they could--the antithesis of Madison and Hamilton and Jay.

The founders built into the federal government a spider web of checks and balances to prevent concentrations of power. The separate branches of government--executive, legislative and judicial--would contend for power, balancing and restraining each other in the process. Similar competition was built into each branch as well.

Checks and Balances

Yet what gave those checks and balances the strength to withstand 200 years of battering was not just the structural or procedural restrictions; mere red tape and structures can eventually be hacked away, as Gingrich and company demonstrated last winter when they bypassed the traditional committee system of writing bills.

In addition to structures, the Constitution’s checks and balances are fashioned from the self-renewing threads of competing interests and ambitions. The system brings all the contending desires and opinions of a huge and diverse nation straight into the middle of the decision making process right from the start.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. . . ,” Madison explained in “The Federalist Papers.” “The private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”

What that means for a putative revolution could be seen here and there throughout the year, but it became especially clear in the climactic weeks of autumn. Consider the experience of Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) as the third week in October was drawing to a close.

Only in his third term, the chairman of the House Republican Conference is Gingrich’s chief bridge to the outsized GOP freshman class, and his brigade had taken a serious hit.

On Oct. 16, three days before the critical House vote to curb the growth of Medicare, the American Hospital Assn. had startled Boehner and Gingrich by coming out against the GOP plan and launching a lobbying blitz against vulnerable young Republican members of Congress.

All year, Boehner said, Republican leaders had been making changes that the AHA had requested and promising to keep addressing their concerns. “Our impression was that the AHA wouldn’t be taking any position. We’d gone over that pretty clearly,” Boehner said later. “It’s hard to say they lied to us, but we had a very clear understanding.

“So I had to bring them in and talk to them like I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone in all my years in politics. . . . It was not pretty. . . . I just felt betrayed. I was hurt.”

In the end, GOP leaders pushed the Medicare bill through the House. But the episode was a portent. “When they began to target vulnerable freshmen and moderates, I wasn’t concerned about losing votes,” Boehner said. “We pretty well had the votes locked up. But this was another cut in the battle. And there are only so many cuts you can take.”

A System That Works

Boehner’s bruising encounter with the hospitals was not a watershed for the “Republican revolution.” This was no Gettysburg or Waterloo. Rather, it was one of hundreds of examples of how the American system still works as the little band of men who built it more than 200 years ago had intended: slowly and deliberately.

“What is government but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” Madison wrote. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

The solution, he concluded, was a system for “supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motive.”

In other words, as Boehner and sometime-history-professor Gingrich found in the Medicare vote, it would be the American Hospital Assn. and the huge hospital corporations, not Great Society Democrats, who would challenge the Republican juggernaut.

No decision emerging from such a cross-fire might be perfect, but none was likely to be hasty, and all were likely to be conclusions that the vast majority would decide it could live with. Hence a stable and enduring society.

The strength of a sea anchor fashioned from competing interests was evident from the fact that much of the conflict over the GOP revolution occurred within Republican ranks. The nicks and cuts inflicted on House leaders by the hospitals were not Madison’s only triumph. Boehner had problems on Medicare with some people from New Jersey as well.

“The second-biggest disappointment of the week,” he called it.

Several members of that state’s delegation complained that the GOP’s plans for Medicare and Medicaid, which underwrites health care for the poor, would disproportionately penalize New Jersey’s citizens and hospitals.

“I’m a strong believer that you should always enter a conversation with the other person’s interest in mind,” Boehner said. “If a member felt he truly couldn’t vote for it, we had to listen and try to work it out.”

The leadership made concessions to assuage those concerns. But in the end, six Republicans voted against the bill, four of whom were from New Jersey.

House leaders’ efforts to hamstring the Environmental Protection Agency ended in outright defeat. In the name of deregulation, the leadership had attached a bundle of riders to the EPA appropriations bill, forbidding it to spend any money enforcing a wide range of environmental regulations.

Not surprisingly, environmental groups and Democrats denounced the riders. What was not expected was the reaction of many Republican members of the House. Defying their leaders, several dozen Republicans joined the Democrats in killing the riders. The leadership rallied and forced a second vote, which revived the provisions.

But in early November, with a conference committee of House and Senate members about to hash out a compromise between House-passed and Senate-passed versions of the appropriation bill, the House voted once more.

Sixty-three Republicans broke ranks and voted with the majority to instruct the House conferees to drop the riders. The GOP votes were from widely scattered areas, including the South and West.

“People have been back home and have been having town meetings and have been catching hell from their constituents,” said Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.).

Many Voices

These experiences showed that even in the House, where the zeal for uncompromising change burned strongest, the country’s enormous diversity of interests and viewpoints was acting as a brake.

The problem with “working it out,” in Boehner’s words, is that it leads to compromise, a known toxin for revolutions.

In important ways, the Republicans who sought to fulfill the “contract with America” and the rest of the GOP agenda were indeed revolutionaries.

For one thing, the way they took the initiative away from the president has almost no parallels in American history.

Perhaps the closest thing to this year’s congressional dominance was the fight over Reconstruction after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Historians emphasize that Reconstruction was a far more cataclysmic period than the present and that hapless President Andrew Johnson was far weaker than Clinton.

But then, as in 1995, it was Congress that both proposed and disposed of important policies. Radical Republicans, convinced that Andrew Johnson’s relatively mild terms for restoring Southern states to their full rights were a betrayal of the Union’s victory, imposed their own, harsher terms.

That Republican Congress also forced adoption of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing equal rights to all, and came within a single vote of removing Johnson from office by impeachment.

The Republican revolution of 1995 has been tame in comparison, but the GOP has controlled the agenda.

And many members of this year’s Republican Congress showed the true revolutionary’s discipline and disdain for danger.

“This Republican Congress is a throwback to Congresses of the past in the sense of a return to party discipline,” said Duane Tananbaum, a historian at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

In addition, especially among the House freshmen but also among some of the new Republican members of the Senate, there has been a most uncustomary indifference to political survival.

“It gives them a very different focus, a very different dynamic from previous Congresses,” Tananbaum said. “They don’t necessarily play it safe and do what’s necessary to get them reelected.”

In addressing the hard issues, however, this Republican Congress has been compelled not only to deal with the hundreds of particular interests and viewpoints that make themselves felt in the House but also to accept the unique role that the Founding Fathers designed for the Senate.

As Hamilton and Madison and the others saw it, having two legislative bodies instead of one was a critical bulwark against haste. So was having one body elected for short terms and the other for long terms.

House members serve two-year terms, facing the voters en masse every other year. Senators serve six-year terms and only one-third of the body faces the voters in any one election year. The House thus is likely to feel every political wind that blows, while the Senate is likely to be relatively insulated.

And where many GOP freshmen see virtue in the intention of staying in government only a little while, the framers counted on long service to give members of the Senate the experience and stability to resist abrupt change--”an anchor against public fluctuation,” in Madison’s phrase.

“There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterward be the most ready to lament and condemn,” the Constitution’s chief architect said.

Designs in Time

The Senate, he said, can then “suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth can regain their authority over the public mind.”

Whether the agenda pressed by this year’s conservative Congress is one of those dangerous brainstorms Madison feared or a chance to set the country on the road to progress is a matter of opinion.

What is clear, however, is that the GOP proposals are being subjected to the kind of long, slow political stress test that the founders envisioned. They have been stretched on the rack of structural checks and balances. They have been trimmed and changed by competing interest groups. And they have been slowed by the anxiety felt even by many House Republicans over the rising apprehension of voters back home as reflected in public opinion polls.

As Boehner put it:

“Here in Washington we do two things: We do policy and we do politics. In the end, these two have to come together. What you see all year is the question: How far can we push the revolution and bring back a majority of our members?”

When all is said and done, this may indeed be the year a Republican revolution was launched. But it will be a strictly “American” revolution--occurring within the framework and at the deliberate pace anticipated by the first conservatives.

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.