End This Game of Gotcha

The problem that now confronts the U.S. House of Representatives transcends the issue of Newt Gingrich’s speakership. It is, rather, the very well-being of the institution that is at stake. In the course of the eight years since Jim Wright’s forced resignation from the speakership, the House has been sucked into a vortex of partisan discord from which it will not soon escape unless a truce is proclaimed.

The occasion for that truce is the announcement last week that Gingrich will pay a $300,000 penalty out of personal rather than campaign funds; the unconventional source of the money is a loan from former Sen. Bob Dole that must be repaid, with interest, in eight years. The arrangement still must be approved by the Ethics Committee, but Gingrich’s decision, along with a statement remarkably free of cant and self-justification, is a sufficient pretext for a cease-fire in the partisan wars.

The House always has been a more combative chamber than the Senate, a place more somnolent than civil. The House has seen duels, fistfights and exchanges of words so harsh that they were expunged from the record. The worst of these excesses, however, took place at a time when the nation was divided over the nonnegotiable questions of slavery and sectionalism. While today’s partisan brawlers have exalted differences over campaign funding and welfare reform to that lofty plane, such issues are, in fact, eminently negotiable--but only between men and women inclined to forbear from characterizing their colleagues as knaves and fatheads.

There was a laudable but mostly ineffective effort at reconciliation last month when squabbling Democrats and Republicans turned a resort in Hershey, Pa., into a temporary replica of the truce village at Panmunjom. It was not long afterward, however, that a battle erupted in the House chamber between Democrat George Miller of California and the terrible-tempered Wisconsin Democrat David Obey on one side, and Republican Whip Tom DeLay on the other. The fracas--over whether Miller could enter in the Congressional Record a newspaper article accusing DeLay of allowing lobbyists to use his office to write legislation--ended up with Obey thrusting the clipping in DeLay’s face.

Just as peace was being restored on the floor, skirmishing intensified in the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight between its authoritarian chairman, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), and the ranking Democrat, Rep. Henry Waxman of California. Waxman’s own well-honed partisanship was further whetted by Burton’s refusal to broaden the committee’s scope of inquiry into campaign finance irregularities to include GOP transgressions as well as those of the Clinton White House. For a day, it appeared as if Burton would make the probe more inclusive as Democrats wished, but his concession proved illusory and Waxman went back on the attack, accusing Burton of receiving illegal contributions to his own 1996 campaign.

The response of some Democrats to Gingrich’s repayment announcement suggests that they do not intend to let up until they have driven him from the speakership. And they may succeed. Let us suppose that they do. And let us further suppose that, against all historical odds, the Democrats manage to recapture a majority of seats in 1998 and install Dick Gephardt as speaker. Can it be imagined that the Republicans will not persist in the cycle of strike and counterstrike that has roiled the House for almost a decade?

The Democrats who began immediately to pick at the scab by accusing Gingrich of accepting money tainted by Dole’s association with tobacco interests or likening the speaker’s settlement terms to those of a polluter who consents to restore the terrain he has poisoned succeed only in perpetuating the atmosphere of hostility that has worked to paralyze the 105th Congress.

No high-flown appeals to responsibility or patriotism need be made to House members to desist from more cheap shots. They all need to have some accomplishments to show the voters for the two years they are spending in Washington. The relentless quest for partisan advantage pursued in this unseemly game of “gotcha” must end, and this is the time to end it.