Logjam Augurs Partisan Strife for Congress

This session of Congress, which began with great feats of bipartisanship and budget balancing, is ending with the two parties apparently intent on mutually assured destruction.

Consider the devastation as Congress stumbles toward adjournment for the year:

President Clinton’s bid for new trade-negotiating power is in shambles. His education testing initiative is on hold. His choice to fill a top civil rights post is on life support. Congress will not even let him conduct the census the way he wants.

Republicans have not done much better. Their much-ballyhooed school voucher plan died in the House. Education tax breaks stalled. A bill banning affirmative action was tabled.

The wreckage is remarkable for a Congress that, less than four months ago, had managed to come together and pass what had once seemed politically impossible: a bipartisan plan to balance the budget, cut taxes and begin to shore up Medicare.

Yet in the last few weeks, the two sides have gone out of their way to magnify their differences on less momentous decisions--from educational testing and vouchers to Clinton’s judicial appointments. If the last few weeks are any indication of what to expect from this Congress in the coming election year, voters are in for a period of large partisan fights over modest substantive agendas. “If you are looking to project next year, look to the last month as a model, not the balanced-budget episode,” said a senior Senate Republican aide.

The logjam of the last few months is a sign not only of stalemate between the parties but of decomposition and disarray within them. New Democrats and old ones, moderate Republicans and conservatives, are all engaged in hand-to-hand combat as they struggle for direction in the wake of the historic budget deal.

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“Neither party can put together the kind of coalition--particularly because of defections from its own ranks--that can allow it to implement any kind of clear agenda,” said Ruy Teixeira, an opinion analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Congress is set to adjourn Thursday, ending a session that divided as precisely as if split by a cleaver. The session’s opening months were shaped by the widespread belief in both parties that voters in 1996 were demanding compromise and moderation when they ratified the division of power between a Democratic White House and Republican Congress.

That conviction provided the impetus for the massive budget deal, which actually embodied agreement between the two parties on a full range of domestic issues that had long divided them--from expanding access to health care for children to the GOP push for tax cuts.

The budget accord boosted public approval ratings for both Clinton and Congress. But all the deal-making produced a backlash among the ideological wings of the two parties--particularly conservative Republicans--who wanted to reemphasize the differences between the parties in the run-up to the 1998 election.

In the fall, the two sides continued to reach some hard-fought agreements--most prominently the annual appropriations bills needed to keep the government running. Clinton also acquiesced to House Republican plans to overhaul the Internal Revenue Service.

But even with these exceptions, the dominant voices this fall belonged to those who sought confrontation rather than compromise.

And in the end, Congress and Clinton settled many of their differences not in a traditional something-for-everyone fashion. Instead, the two sides tended to leave nothing for anyone.

On education, fierce resistance from House Republicans forced Clinton to delay his plan for voluntary national education tests. In turn, Clinton is expected to veto a Republican school voucher scheme for the District of Columbia. Clinton wanted to use a new statistical method in the 2000 census; Republicans did not. Finally the two sides were forced essentially to put off the decision until 1999. Campaign finance reform died in the Senate amid dueling filibusters between Republicans resisting restrictions on soft money and Democrats opposed to limits on union political activity.

The belligerent mood carried over to appointments. Senate Republicans are poised to reject Clinton’s nomination of Los Angeles lawyer Bill Lann Lee to a top civil rights job without even bringing it to a full vote of the Senate. That followed the GOP decision last summer to reject Clinton’s nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld as ambassador to Mexico without even a hearing.

As striking as the conflict between the parties this fall was the division within them. Last summer, three-fourths of congressional Democrats backed Clinton on the budget deal, despite an effort by House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) to kindle a revolt. But after that, the president’s position eroded.

Seventy-five House Democrats joined Republicans to oppose Clinton’s education tests--a defection that weakened Clinton’s hand in the final negotiations with the GOP. Then the president suffered an almost unprecedented repudiation this week as about 80% of House Democrats indicated that they would side with Gephardt in opposing Clinton’s bid for expedited fast-track trade negotiating authority. That forced the president to pull the legislation.

On both the testing and trade issues, Clinton maintained support from a majority of Senate Democrats. But many analysts believe that the sequential revolts in the House foreshadow a growing conflict between liberals and centrist “New Democrats” over the party’s direction as the campaign of 2000--expected to feature a showdown between Gephardt and Vice President Al Gore--approaches.

“The [fast-track trade authorization] vote will embolden the left-labor-liberal elements of the party, and rightly so,” said Teixeira. “But Al From and the gang at the [centrist] Democratic Leadership Council aren’t going to see this as a signal to soften their policies.”

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Though overshadowed by the Democrats’ implosion over trade, Republicans also revealed significant fractures during the session’s last days. Since the budget deal, the dominant force in the GOP has been the conservative demand for more confrontation with Clinton. Yet the session’s final hours raised questions about whether Republicans have the votes to consistently pass a confrontational conservative agenda. “Clearly the answer is no, as of today,” said Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Santa Clara).

Last week, the GOP suffered a humiliating reversal in the House when 35 Republicans joined with Democrats to kill a proposal for a nationwide test of school vouchers--an initiative that Republican strategists had hoped would be a cornerstone of their 1998 campaign agenda. Likewise, conservatives were stunned last week when four Republicans joined with Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee to kill a GOP proposal to roll back federal affirmative action programs--which also had been expected to stand as a pillar of the GOP election-year agenda.

Even when Republicans held together to pass legislation allowing parents to set aside tax-free accounts to pay for public or private school costs, they lacked the votes to break a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

In two distinct respects, public opinion reinforces the trend toward stalemate. On the one hand, general public satisfaction with the country’s direction diminishes the demand for bold action from Washington, noted Mark Penn, Clinton’s pollster. Moreover, polls show that, although the budget deal broadly reflected a public consensus for smaller, but still active, government, there is less public agreement on potential follow-up initiatives, such as rewriting the tax code or reforming entitlements.

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In this political climate, about all Congress can reasonably hope to accomplish in the coming year is action on issues that lack partisan edge, like a big highway bill or possible legislation to codify the tobacco settlement. With Clinton now conceding the issue, IRS reform may fall into this category, too.

The prospect for additional activity may depend on whether the Republican majority decides that it needs more legislative accomplishments as the election approaches. When the GOP made that calculation late last summer, it sprang a series of agreements with Clinton on such issues as reforming welfare and raising the minimum wage.

“We’re going to have a chaotic year,” said a Senate GOP aide.