Partisanship, Not Programs, Challenges Budget Writers

A specter is haunting the budget negotiations between President Clinton and Republican leaders in Congress: the specter of a failed 1990 budget agreement.

As they inch forward, many of the negotiators are cautiously optimistic that they can strike a deal to balance the budget over the next five years. But they remain uncertain that they can then sell such an agreement to a majority in both chambers of Congress, especially the House.

“I think it’s going to be a divided vote,” said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “This is one where the leadership does need to show leadership.”

The shadow hanging over the current talks is the precedent of 1990, when a GOP president and leaders of a Democratic Congress reached a budget agreement--only to see their handiwork decisively voted down by an unusual left-right coalition in the House. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is especially unlikely to forget that example. As then-minority whip, he led the uprising that sank the original pact between then President George Bush and the top Democrats.

No single element in this year’s budget talks is quite as explosive as Bush’s decision to accept new taxes in 1990, the provision that sparked the revolt by Gingrich and other Republicans. But the task of assembling a majority for a budget deal--always a precarious proposition--may still be more difficult now than seven years ago, largely because Congress has grown even more ideologically split since then.

“The politics are trickier than the [budget] math right now,” one senior White House official said.

With their own positions weakened by ethical allegations, both Clinton and Gingrich are insisting on a deal that maintains wide support within their respective parties. But the growing distance between the parties in Congress may make it impossible to craft an agreement broadly backed on both sides.

That means the critical question remaining in the budget talks may be less economic than political: Which side--if any--is willing to accept widespread dissent in its own camp as the price of reaching a bipartisan pact? “There is the makings of a deal,” said Rep. Charles W. Stenholm, a moderate Democrat from Texas. “But it would require sufficient objections from both extremes.”

The uncertainty about how to sell a budget agreement now looms larger because, beginning last week, long-stalled talks between Congress and the White House began to show signs of real movement, as Republicans and the administration swapped offers that narrowed their differences in such important areas as tax cuts and Medicare.

But obstacles remain to a consensus on a proposal to scale back cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients--the politically sensitive plan to adjust the consumer price index.

As the talks near their critical stage, with several days of discussion scheduled for this week, optimists believe that the attraction of voting for the first balanced budget in nearly 30 years will outweigh reservations about the plan’s particulars. Pessimists, however, see ominous signs.

The closer the negotiators have come to an agreement behind closed doors, the more vociferous have been complaints outside the bargaining room from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the conservative wing of the GOP.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and other liberal Democrats have squirmed as Clinton has proposed larger reductions in the growth of Medicare. More than half the members of the House Democratic caucus last week signed a letter saying that they would oppose any budget deal that does not call for deeper cuts in Pentagon spending and more money for key domestic priorities.

Among Republicans, conservatives are threatening to jump ship if the budget deal lets domestic spending grow too much or cuts taxes too little. Ten conservative senators recently wrote to Lott threatening to oppose a budget deal that violated those principles. Senate Finance Committee Chairman William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.) already has denounced as too small the compromise tax cut GOP negotiators have offered.

To make matters worse, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats may link arms to resist any effort to revise the price index. Liberal Democrats bitterly oppose the idea because it reduces benefits to their core constituencies among the elderly and organized labor. Conservative Republicans fear that Democrats would use it to replay a successful 1996 campaign theme, that the GOP has pushed policies harmful to the elderly.

On Monday, Lott added his voice to that chorus, warning that he could not ask Republicans to “walk the plank” for an adjustment. Voicing frustration that Clinton has not moved more aggressively to embrace the idea, Lott said that it may be “too late” for negotiators to agree to a CPI adjustment.

The uncertainty about whether any budget deal could get the votes to pass is a reflection, in part, of how far Congress has come from the days when a handful of powerful barons could meet behind closed doors and count on the rank and file to back whatever deal they cut. Today, the committee leaders who are negotiating the budget may be respected by their colleagues, but they are in no position to deliver any votes but their own.

The cross-fire also testifies to the continued partisanship of Congress. Measured by a variety of means, academic experts say that the ideological distance between the average legislator in each party is steadily widening.

“The typical Democrat in Congress has shifted far to the left, and the typical vote on the Republican side has gone far to the right, opening up a huge gap between the centers of both parties,” said John Cogan, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto.

Clinton and the GOP leadership have further complicated the equation through their insistence on maintaining high levels of party unity in any deal. In private meetings, Clinton has told House Democrats that he will not support a deal that half of them don’t back. Likewise, among Republicans. “The working assumption is that we’re not going to sign a deal that doesn’t get the vast majority of our [membership],” said John Feehry, spokesman for House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

There is little precedent for a budget deal that could draw such broad support in both parties. Clinton’s 1993 budget package passed entirely with Democratic votes. No Republicans in either chamber supported it. After a majority of both House Republicans and Democrats voted down the original agreement reached between Bush and congressional Democrats in 1990, the reformulated deal depended almost entirely on Democratic votes to pass.

The closest thing to a truly bipartisan budget deal came in 1982, when a majority of both Democrats and Republicans in the House voted for a tax hike that then Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) designed to attack the deficit caused by Ronald Reagan’s tax cut the year before. But even that legislation provoked a rebellion by GOP conservatives--prominently including Gingrich--that left bitter divisions inside the party.

To many observers, that history suggests that it is unlikely the negotiators this year can fashion a compromise that does not require either Clinton or the GOP leadership to accept more internal defection than they have said they could stomach.

In Congress, the expectation is that Clinton in the end is more likely than Gingrich to accept a deal that divides his party.

But even if Clinton is willing to take that risk, building a budget majority still promises to be a nail-biter, especially in the House. With Congress increasingly divided between hostile extremes, said one White House political advisor, “the question is . . . is there a majority in the middle?”