GOP Class of ’94 Clamoring for Confrontation

Three years ago, he was a gleaming exemplar of the Republican Party’s future. Freshly elected to Congress in 1994 as part of the conservative vanguard of self-styled revolutionaries, Rep. David M. McIntosh of Indiana was brimming with energy to upend the ways of Washington. An acolyte of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), he was rewarded with the kind of power and position rarely granted a greenhorn.

McIntosh now finds himself in a very different place: at odds with GOP leaders as the party takes an increasingly conciliatory tack. It got so bad this summer, after a failed conservative effort to oust Gingrich, that McIntosh was seen as the target of a threat by the speaker to take retribution on disloyal Republicans.

McIntosh’s transformation from golden boy to enfant terrible of the House GOP is emblematic of the changing fortunes of the Republican equivalent of the baby-boom generation--the big 1994 class of rambunctious Republicans who tipped the partisan balance of power in the House for the first time in a generation and set the confrontational tone for their first year in power.

If the rebels were in the driver’s seat then, they are riding in a sidecar now.

All this year, they have been fighting an uphill battle to steer the House on a more conservative course. They were the core of GOP opposition to the budget-balancing deal between congressional leaders and the White House, which passed overwhelmingly. They were ringleaders of the bungled effort to oust Gingrich.

Last week, they tied up the House for days with an effort to rewrite a social-spending bill that didn’t square with their conservative principles. They did manage to wrangle some victories--including a cut in President Clinton’s Goals 2000 education-reform initiative--and they are expected this week to win a vote to block funding for Clinton’s national education testing plan. But they lost on dozens of other amendments, and the social-spending bill as a whole is expected to remain unacceptable to most conservatives.

That debate has crystallized the quandary that has faced this cadre of conservatives all year: They are clamoring for a confrontational approach to Clinton at a time when many of their GOP colleagues, including a speaker who is trying to repair the political damage suffered during a lengthy ethics investigation, have concluded that the public wants Congress to end the partisan bickering and get on with the nation’s business.

“They are behaving the way Newt Gingrich trained them to behave,” said John F. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. “But now the program is different. Compromise has replaced confrontation in Gingrich’s order of the day.”

Gingrich, in fact, says he sympathizes with the sophomores, even though he is willing to accept a more incremental rate of change than they are.

“I agree with them,” Gingrich said Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week” program. “I mean, I think the sophomores were elected in ’94 . . . as people who were going to change Washington dramatically. . . . But if you’re going to have four years of a liberal Democrat in the White House and conservative Republicans in the legislative branch, you try every morning to move the system as far as you can.”

Conservatives Push for Bolder Agenda

The fate of the class of ’94 provides a window into a battle royal over the Republican Party’s direction in the wake of the budget-balancing deal. With that grand compromise behind them, conservatives are reasserting themselves with demands that the GOP push a bolder agenda featuring more tax cuts, antiabortion initiatives and opposition to affirmative action.

Although their numbers are dwindling, the class of ’94 will continue to have a loud voice in the debate. And even if they don’t get their way, they will keep up the pressure on the party not to drift too far from its conservative base.

“This gets discouraging,” said Rep. Marshall “Mark” Sanford (R-S.C.). “But if we weren’t here, where would the party be?”

Sanford is just one of 73 Republicans elected to the House in 1994--the huge influx that gave their party control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. They were, by and large, conservatives with a passionate anti-Washington streak. They were hellbent on more than traditional GOP goals of cutting taxes and balancing the federal budget: They wanted to smash the business-as-usual, log-rolling mind-set of the Washington establishment.

They were loyal foot soldiers who helped drive the GOP agenda in 1995, as the Republicans’ “contract with America” swept through the House. Their fervor helped stiffen the spines of GOP leaders when they went to battle with Clinton. Their resistance to compromise had a powerful influence on the budget strategy that produced two government shutdowns in the winter of 1995-96.

But when those shutdowns proved to be politically disastrous, with polls showing that the GOP bore the brunt of the blame, Republican leaders began backing away from the politics of confrontation. A more conciliatory approach in 1996 produced compromises with Clinton on welfare, health care and the minimum wage.

After the 1996 elections, only 58 members of the class of ’94 remained in the House, and the political landscape became even more inhospitable. Many in their party saw the outcome of the 1996 elections--returning a Democrat to the White House and a narrower GOP majority in Congress--as a sign the public wants the two parties to work together and put a lid on partisan combat. GOP leaders chose a cautious strategy of letting Clinton set the agenda.

To be sure, not everyone in the class of ’94 is unhappy with that course. The class is not, and never was, a conservative monolith, because it includes several moderates like Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.).

“Some ran on the idea that they wanted to turn the place inside out,” LaHood said. “The rest of us are more interested in trying to make something happen.”

But the class includes a cohesive core of about 20 conservative activists who continue to meet, plot and coordinate their causes--a potentially potent faction at a time when Republicans have only a 20-vote edge over the Democrats in the House. Several classmates were so eager to stick together this year that they arranged to have offices on the same hallway, dubbed the “hard-core floor.” This cadre has repeatedly surfaced as thorns in the side of the House GOP leadership.

“There is a resolute bunch of people . . . that hasn’t moved an inch,” said Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.).

Gingrich Rebuffed on Tax-Cut Issue

When Gingrich, hobbled by ethics woes related to his political activities, scrambled for votes to win reelection as speaker in January, half of the 10 Republicans bold enough to vote against him were from the class of ’94.

When Gingrich suggested early this year that tax cuts might take a back seat to a budget-balancing deal, McIntosh fired off a “hell, no!” letter and collected signatures from more than two dozen Republicans.

Although the budget-balancing deal in the end included tax cuts, conservatives complained that it did not go far enough to cut spending. Of the 32 House Republicans who voted against the spending-cut part of the deal, nearly half were first elected in 1994.

When the coup plot against Gingrich began to thicken this summer, the ringleader was Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), and the cabal was thick with fellow members of the sophomore class. Gingrich, in a leadership meeting, reportedly threatened retribution against the rebels, although Gingrich spokeswoman Christina Martin now says he was misconstrued.

The fact that the 1994 class is such a tough crowd is a reflection, in part, of how they got to Washington. Many did not see themselves as career politicians and imposed term limits on themselves. As a result, they tend to be less inclined to patiently wait for power to flow to them.

“They came in with the term-limits attitude: We’re going to Congress to do a certain job, then we’re going to come home and do something different,” said David Mason, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “If things get too bad, I can walk away.”

The fight over the social-spending bill laid bare the extent and limits of the sophomores’ influence. They led a faction of conservative critics vehemently opposed to the money bill as drafted by the House Appropriations Committee. In keeping with the budget deal, the $80-billion bill would let social spending increase by more than $5 billion. It further rankled conservatives by spending more money on Democratic priorities. Conservative critics took over the floor and offered a barrage of amendments to shift spending and impose conservative policies.

The effort gridlocked the House all week, trying the patience of some senior members. But GOP leaders showed no inclination to rein in what amounted to a filibuster. That was probably smart of Gingrich, said one Republican close to him, if he wants to rebuild bridges to the conservatives who plotted his overthrow. “Newt’s in a precarious position,” the Republican said.

Most of the amendments failed by wide margins. Even so, conservatives claimed a big victory when the House voted to cut Clinton’s school-reform initiative, and Democrats conceded that the amendment to block his education testing plan is certain to pass when it is taken up this week. Those victories may not be sustained in the Senate, however, and conservatives acknowledge that the most important point of their weeklong filibuster was to send a message to grass-roots conservatives who share their disillusionment with the budget deal.

“We have sent out a message that the bulk of the Republicans still believe in those conservative principles,” McIntosh said. “The message to the base outside of Washington is that there are still people willing to fight for those principles.”