GOP Scrambling to Salvage Agenda After Budget Wreck

Congressional Republicans, sifting through the wreckage of their failed drive to win a budget agreement, now are struggling to salvage pieces of their legislative agenda and retool the political strategy that guided their first heady year in power.

The collapse of budget talks between Republicans and the White House has buried most of the initiatives that had topped the GOP agenda: reforming welfare, cutting taxes, giving states control over Medicaid, bailing out Medicare, balancing the budget by the year 2002.

Faced with the prospect of heading into the 1996 election campaign empty-handed, the GOP seems to be abandoning its all-or-nothing strategy, looking instead for ways to enact its agenda piecemeal.

In a display of what the go-for-broke revolutionaries have been reduced to, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) last week offered a compromise to President Clinton that would have been unimaginable a few weeks ago: congressional approval of an increase in the debt ceiling for a fraction of the spending and tax cuts the GOP had sought.

“Maybe you do have to take it one bite at the time, rather than go for the whole enchilada,” said Rep. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a leader of the hard-line freshman class.

Some Republicans, eager to put the budget fight behind them, are looking for other issues to flesh out their agenda. But the pickings are slim: Telecommunications legislation is near enactment; immigration reform may be on the way; regulatory reform could be revived. But those are shadows of the grand ambitions the GOP advertised in the 1994 campaign.

Republicans’ reassessment of their agenda and strategy threatens to reopen divisions within the party that were largely papered over by the balanced-budget drive. They include those between moderates and conservatives who disagree on social issues such as abortion and between pragmatists who want to salvage some accomplishments and take-no-prisoners purists.

“There is a lot that can be accomplished, but we’re going to have to go about it differently than we did last year,” said Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), a member of the GOP leadership. “We have to transition into a new strategy.”

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That strategy is still being formed and will be the subject of intense debate. Much of what the GOP does may be geared more to drawing partisan battle lines for the 1996 campaign than to enacting laws. This week, for example, House Republicans plan to put Democrats on the spot by forcing a vote on Clinton’s latest seven-year balanced-budget proposal.

But beyond the posturing, many Republicans are wary of ending the year bereft of legislative accomplishments. “It’s very important that we push forward an active agenda,” said Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.).

And some who are not ready to throw in the towel when it comes to reaching a broad budget agreement are trying to craft a plan that could draw support from a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats.

But increasingly, Republicans are beginning to think about whether they can--or should--try to resurrect pieces of their budget and pass them on their own. That’s what Gingrich tried to do when he proposed adding a $29-billion version of the GOP’s tax credit for families onto the debt-increase legislation, along with a “down payment” of $50 billion to $100 billion in spending cuts.

It was a remarkable retreat for a party that spent last year insisting that it would never settle for less than a $245-billion tax cut and a seven-year balanced-budget plan.

Some of the rank and file have bridled at Gingrich’s switch to a conciliatory, incremental strategy and are pushing the speaker to demand more from Clinton in exchange for the debt-limit increase.

But even some of the most conservative House members now are willing to take a piecemeal approach. “You have to do the doable,” said Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.).

The episode crystallizes the strategic choices that will face Republicans for the rest of this year: How much should they compromise for the sake of enacting legislation? How much of their agenda should they let die for the sake of ideological purity? Either approach carries political risks.

“It’s risky for them to come up empty-handed, but it’s also risky for them to compromise with the president and sell out their principles,” said William F. Connelly Jr., a political scientist at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.

That is the dilemma Republicans face as they try to decide whether to resurrect welfare reform legislation, which Clinton vetoed despite his desire to “end welfare as we know it.” Some Republicans want to send Clinton the less-stringent version originally passed by the Senate, which has a better chance of being signed.

“We could send the Senate bill back to him,” said Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.), a leading architect of the legislation, “and what we don’t like we can change next year.” But that’s not the way a lot of conservative Republicans see it. They think the Senate version concedes too much, and would rather have no reform than a law that does not go far enough.

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As a tactical matter, House GOP leaders may try to get parts of the agenda accomplished by keeping government operating through a series of one-month funding bills--using each measure as a vehicle to achieve an item on their wish list. But that strategy does not give them much leverage because Republicans clearly have no stomach for letting government funding lapse again.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) argues that Republicans should shift their focus back to the unfinished “contract with America” agenda.

“We need to look back and see what it was we did in 1994 that accounted for our overwhelming victory and go back to that message,” McCain said.

So Republicans may renew efforts to pass a presidential line-item veto, product-liability reform and other elements of the contract that stalled--in some cases because of differences among Republicans themselves.