Clinton’s Proposed 1999 Budget Ignites Wrangling Among Republicans

Let the family feud begin.

Now that President Clinton has handed over his fiscal 1999 budget, the Republicans who control Congress are embarking on a heated internal debate that could prove just as important as their more public wrangling with Clinton and the Democrats.

As they craft their own budget over the next few months, Republicans will try to paint their portrait of the post-deficit landscape--an important act of self-definition at this watershed moment in fiscal and political history.

Clinton painted his vision--”Social Security First”--in bold, simple strokes by proposing that any surplus be used to prepare the pension system for the baby boom’s stampede into retirement.

But among Republicans, there are many artists at the canvas. Some want to buy down the national debt. Others are ready to go on a spending spree, but with their own shopping list, not Clinton’s.

Most want to cut taxes, but a thousand flowers are blooming from that fertile GOP soil. Some would eliminate the “marriage penalty”; others want a broader-based cut; some want to keep reducing estate taxes.

“We’re going to have a pretty tough internal fight,” admitted House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio).

In many ways, the budget debate between Clinton and the GOP over the post-deficit world sounds remarkably like the decades of debate when Democrats and Republicans were knee-deep in red ink.

Republicans are greeting Clinton’s plan to launch a series of social initiatives--Medicare expansion, child-care subsidies, a slew of education investments--as just another spasm of big-government liberalism.

“This is a budget that only a liberal could love,” said House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). “We cannot afford to return to the old days of high taxes, more spending and a larger, less accountable government.”

Clinton is playing the Social Security card that has worked so well for Democrats in the past. In calling for using the surplus to shore up Social Security, Clinton is positioning Democrats to look like the guardians of the pension system and Republicans to look like they are risking Social Security if they use the surplus for tax cuts.

Those arguments sound as well-worn as the bickering of a long-married couple. But the debate among Republicans is being conducted with fresh voices, and its outcome is hard to predict.

Republicans are beginning the year with their budget strategy uncharacteristically in flux. For each of the last three years since they took control of Congress, Republicans have arrived in January with a clear sense of where their budgets were headed.

In 1995 and 1996, the heyday of the GOP conservative “revolution,” Republicans were hell-bent on balancing the budget and forcing Clinton to accept it on their terms. That course led to the government shutdowns of 1995-96. In 1997, Republicans began the year with a clear consensus that they would balance the budget on a bipartisan basis, and early on began high-level negotiations with the administration to that end.

Now, almost nothing about the GOP game plan is clear. “We are still in uncharted waters,” said Richard May, a lobbyist who until last year was staff director of the House Budget Committee.

Already, fault lines among Republicans have emerged over the most basic elements of their budget strategy. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas has urged fellow Republicans to one-up the president by balancing the budget this year rather than waiting until the next. Other Republican leaders have given this idea the cold shoulder.

Even more evident are divisions among Republicans about what to do with the budget surplus once it materializes. One pole of the debate is personified by House Transportation Committee Chairman Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), who is pushing for a big increase in highway spending and last year showed a willingness to bust the budget agreement to get it. Other Republicans, including Gingrich, are clamoring for more defense spending.

On the other end of the spectrum is House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer (R-Texas), who wants to close the door on new spending and recommends that any surplus be split between tax cuts and retiring the national debt.

Among the tax-cut crowd, the diverse array of cuts being promoted is a field guide to the constituencies of the Republican base: Small business advocates want further cuts in the estate tax. Social conservatives want to reduce the so-called “marriage penalty.” Economic conservatives are eyeing broader-based cuts, such as an increase in the size of the lowest tax bracket.

Republicans acknowledge it will be politically more difficult to push a big tax cut in the face of Clinton’s demand that all budget surpluses be used to bail out Social Security. Already, Republicans seem to be giving higher priority to sticking to the budget agreement than to cutting taxes. “The resolve to stay within the budget constraints laid down last year is pretty firm,” said Terry Holt, spokesman for the House Republican Conference.

Voices outside Congress are calling for a more expansive view of the opportunities presented to conservatives in the post-deficit era. Two writers for the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard have called for a more “robust conservatism” that is not so reflexively anti-government, but instead proudly uses federal power in the name of “national greatness.”

Kasich argues that nothing less is at stake in this year’s budget debate than the soul of the Republican Party, and he is girding for a tough fight against pressure to increase spending for highways and defense beyond the caps set in last year’s budget agreement.

“If we break the budget agreement” by increasing spending, Kasich said, “the Washington establishment has stolen our soul.”