Washington Appears Eager to Say ‘Bye-Bye’ to Bipartisanship

Suddenly, it’s beginning to look a lot like gridlock.

Just over two months after President Clinton proudly hailed the massive deal to balance the federal budget as a “monument” to bipartisanship, his administration and the Republican Congress again are battling to impasse on a formidable list of issues--from the campaign finance reform legislation that collapsed in the Senate on Tuesday to the antiabortion measure approved by the House on Wednesday.

From the environment to education, from the courts to the Internal Revenue Service, the two sides are steaming toward new standoffs--and precious few bill-signing ceremonies.

This recoil from bipartisanship reflects the aversion among activists in both parties--but especially among Republicans--to the deal-making strategy that allowed Clinton and Congress to claim progress on an array of concerns from mid-1996 through this summer. But these agreements also blunted the differences between the parties that had been so clear during the 1995-96 budget battle.

“What happened in 1995 is we pursued the ideal and in so doing we got beat up a little bit by the president over the so-called government shutdown,” said Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), a leading critic of the deal-making strategy. “And I think everybody said: ‘Boy that wasn’t fun, let’s try something else.’ So we tried something else--but we got beat up by our own gang. I think everybody has come to the conclusion [that] we’d rather be beat up by the other guys than be beat up by our own guys.”

Clinton’s tone has not changed as dramatically as the GOP’s. But his constantly recalibrated balancing of cooperation and confrontation has assumed a harder edge recently as Republicans have sharpened their challenges to him.

Since the budget deal, Clinton has rebuffed GOP calls to test school vouchers in Washington, D.C., threatened to veto an appropriations bill over Republican efforts to block use of statistical sampling in the 2000 census and accused the GOP in harsh terms of “creating a vacancy crisis” by moving slowly to consider his federal court nominees.

Significant factions in each party continue to prefer conciliation. Most Senate Democrats, centrist House Democrats and moderate Republicans found their influence enhanced when both sides were trying to build coalitions. And some measures continue to attract broad support. Many appropriations bills are moving along nicely. The House easily passed a Food and Drug Administration reform bill Tuesday by voice vote. The recent congressional pay raise drew broad support.

But such moments of comity are becoming increasingly rare, especially on front-burner issues.

The escalating conflicts between Clinton and Congress, although less intense, recall 1995, when the new GOP majority pursued a strategy of unremitting confrontation. That approach--which culminated in two government shutdowns--thrilled GOP activists. But it drove Congress’ approval ratings down to a level that gave Democrats hope of regaining control in last fall’s election.

When he succeeded Bob Dole as Senate majority leader in 1996, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) engineered an abrupt change in direction. He negotiated a series of deals with Clinton on such issues as welfare reform and the minimum wage that bolstered Congress’ standing with the public and helped the GOP preserve its control in last year’s vote.

That strategy reached its apogee this summer with the sweeping agreement to balance the budget by 2002. After the deal, both Clinton and Congress saw their public approval ratings spike upward.

“There was certainly enough feedback from the public that cooperation and achieving things pays off to incumbents,” said pollster Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

But within the GOP, many strategists viewed these gains as ephemeral--and warned that the party risked losses in the 1998 election if it did not give energy to its core supporters through more hard-edged battles with Clinton.

That argument has drawn support from a chorus of conservative pundits, the small group of House conservatives who plotted a coup against House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) last summer and many of the GOP leaders exploring potential presidential candidacies in 2000.

The result: The GOP congressional leadership is shifting its emphasis from attracting swing voters with maximum accomplishment to inspiring its base by stressing confrontation.

“During the budget [talks], I saw a lot of our . . . leaders make decisions not to go forward with conservative ideas,” said Rep. David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.). “That will be reversed.”

With many Democrats--especially in the House--also itching for sharper disputes, the stage is set for more filibusters, more veto threats, more partisan rhetoric.

Nowhere has the resurgence of partisanship been more vitriolic than in the debate over campaign finance reform, which fell victim to classic Senate gridlock Tuesday: Each party filibustered the other’s proposal to overhaul the fund-raising system.

Instead of seeking compromise, top Senate Republicans made the debate even more partisan by proposing to curb political activities by unions, sending Democrats to the defense of their political base.

The deadlock is ironic because a compromise, like the budget deal, could go a long way toward boosting Congress’ approval ratings--and thus the reelection prospects of incumbents, analysts said. “There would be no question” that Congress’ ratings would improve if it reached agreement on reform, said Kohut.

House Democrats, for their part, have resorted to tactics reminiscent of the guerrilla warfare that won Gingrich fame as a backbencher. Recently, for instance, they have tied up the House with stalling tactics to protest GOP failure to bring up campaign reform.

Battle lines also have been drawn on education, where each side is trying to block the other’s highest priority. While Senate Democrats filibustered the GOP pilot project for school vouchers here, House Republicans voted to kill the signature White House proposal to develop national math and reading tests for schoolchildren. Clinton has threatened to veto the D.C. bill if it includes vouchers and the Education Department bill if it does not include the tests.

Another veto showdown looms on the arcane but politically crucial question of how to conduct the next census. The GOP wants to block the use of a statistical method known as “sampling”--a technique designed to avoid the big undercount that marred the 1990 census. The political stakes are enormous because Democrats are expected to fare better in the next congressional redistricting if sampling is used. Neither side shows any sign of blinking.

The GOP legislative agenda is littered with bills that cater to key conservative constituencies. The House on Tuesday passed a bill that would curb the president’s power to designate environmentally sensitive lands as national monuments. Wednesday, the House revived legislation banning a certain form of late-term abortions, sending it to the White House for a certain veto.

Republicans also are revving up their anti-tax, anti-big-government base with a push to overhaul the Internal Revenue Service. Clinton has responded with quick and certain opposition to calls for creating an independent board to govern the tax agency.

Bipartisanship remains possible on Clinton’s bid for enhanced trade negotiating power, as Republicans have provided crucial support for renewal of “fast-track” authority, which would require that Congress vote on trade treaties without amending them. But even here, the GOP has set out a relatively hard line. While moderate Democrats insist that fast-track permit Clinton to negotiate labor and environmental standards with other nations, the GOP bills in both chambers would keep that authority to a minimum.