Federal Wheels Turning, but Drive Is Gone

The government is deporting illegal immigrants in record numbers. The Justice Department’s massive antitrust trial against Microsoft Corp. is moving full speed ahead. The government will be buying about $50 million in hogs because the pork market has tanked.

In these and thousands of other ways, the public’s business is still being done and the federal government continues to function, even though the House voted Saturday to impeach President Clinton and the Senate may spend the first few months of next year as the jury in Clinton’s trial.

But that does not mean the continuing struggle over impeachment will have no effect. Although much will continue as usual, what almost surely will not happen is action on high-profile policy issues, where the gears of decision-making need the political lubrication of compromise: between Democrats and Republicans; between the Clinton administration and Congress.

Social Security reform? Forget it. A tax cut? Not in this climate. Issues as knotty as these are hard enough to resolve in the seventh and eighth years of any presidency, when attention is already beginning to turn to whom the next president might be.

Even without impeachment’s looming menace, there appeared to be at most half a year to make tough political decisions before the prospect of the 2000 presidential election put bipartisan cooperation out of reach. Now even that six-month window appears to have closed, if not by partisan animosities then by the fact that the Senate may have to spend much of its time on impeachment.

Although Clinton’s budget office is hard at work on the spending and tax document he will submit to Congress early next year, major initiatives that would require bipartisan agreement, such as Medicare savings and tax cuts, figure to be out of reach.

“Impeachment does make it very, very difficult to do tax and budget issues,” said Clint Stretch, a managing partner at financial services firm Deloitte & Touche LLP. “It’s pretty hard [for Clinton] to negotiate in good faith with people who want to take your job away from you.”

Washington lobbyist John Motley is resigned to waiting for the next presidential election for a chance at resolving the long-term financial problems facing Social Security.

“I’m not optimistic that we’re going to deal with much over the next two years,” Motley said. “It’s going to be very partisan. . . . The next time we’re going to get any comity is after 2000, and that will be the first real chance we have to do Social Security.”

But for most of the rest of government, life will go on.

The Constitution prescribes that William H. Rehnquist, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, preside over the Senate trial. But the Supreme Court should be able to go about its business; it has often functioned while one justice performed other duties. Chief Justice Earl Warren, for example, presided over the commission investigating President Kennedy’s assassination, and Justice Robert Jackson was involved in the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II.

Moreover, the court’s schedule might well permit Rehnquist to preside over the Senate and still carry out all or most of his other responsibilities.

Even Wall Street, a frequent barometer of national stress, should be largely unaffected, according to Wall Street analysts.

“You’ll get a knee-jerk reaction in the market--a drop,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s DRI. “I’d expect the market to come back but be a bit depressed until the Senate trial is over.”

Wyss says the impeachment drama will have little effect on the economy, but that the stock market, which is on a hair trigger, is likely to watch the events closely. The biggest worry for Wall Street is that there could be an international financial crisis if the president and his top advisors are distracted.

So far, fears that the president will be unable to do his job have been unfounded. When U.N. weapon inspectors in Iraq protested that Saddam Hussein was making their job impossible, Clinton and his security team responded swiftly with a bombing campaign on the eve of the House impeachment vote.

In the absence of external cataclysms, “everything we normally do, we’ll continue to do,” said Campbell Gardett, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. “We pay 900 million claims by Medicare every year, and that will continue to go on. And we’re reviewing the applications of the last handful of states that are putting in place the new health insurance program for children.”

Nor is the government merely continuing on autopilot.

At the height of the House impeachment fight last week, top Interior Department officials worked so intensely on several crucial projects--one of them the effort to protect the Headwaters forest in Northern California from logging--that, according to officials there, they had no time to think about Clinton’s plight.

“All week we had these conference calls that went on for hours with 20 to 30 people on the line from California, Washington, D.C., and some calling in from Phoenix, all on the Headwaters forest issue,” said Tim Ahern, Interior’s deputy communications director. “One meeting broke at nearly 2 a.m. on Thursday morning.

“I had on CNN in the background in my office, and every once in a while I’d look up and think, ‘Oh yeah, there’s something else important going on.’ But I never even had a chance to read the papers.”

Indeed, although Clinton’s impeachment will leave a lasting mark in the history books, the budget deadlock that produced a government shutdown in 1995 had a far greater immediate effect on the electorate.

During that period, there were costly delays in getting passports and home loans. Veterans’ benefit checks were delayed. National parks closed. Tourism in Washington all but stopped.

“When the government shut down, there were a lot of people who thought they didn’t like government who figured out that they needed it more than they thought,” said G. Calvin Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College. “The government is an enormous accumulation of routines. There’s just 5% or 10% of government outside of that framework, and in the short term those [functions] can be postponed or fudged.”