Congress Is Embarked on Do-Little Mission

Many Republican members of Congress have returned from their unusually long year-end recess with a distinct desire to do very little in 1998--and they hope that will be just fine with the American public.

Barely a week into a high-stakes, election-year session, it appears increasingly likely that Congress could adjourn in the fall with a remarkably short list of accomplishments.

“People are saying: ‘Congress, just leave us alone!’ ” explained Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.).

Having reached a historic balanced-budget agreement with President Clinton last year, “the best thing we can do is stay the course,” said Rep. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), adding, “and it doesn’t take a lot of new legislation to do that.”

“It’s pretty clear that when Congress left last fall, they wanted to get out as quickly as they could, come back as late as they could, and stay in as little as they could,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The basic attitude of the majority is that the more we’re in session, the more we’ll screw up. So we should just do the minimum.”

The deep philosophical differences between Democrats and Republicans--which each side would like to highlight as an election approaches--also could contribute to a do-little session. The parties are at loggerheads over a dizzying array of major issues, including a minimum wage increase, various children’s initiatives, campaign finance reform, Medicare expansion, tax policy and the terms of any new U.S. funding for the International Monetary Fund.

“We’re heading for a kind of collision course here,” said Ornstein.

The tobacco settlement legislation is also in doubt, and even seemingly noncontroversial measures such as Internal Revenue Service reform and a joint resolution to back Clinton on Iraq have bogged down, at least for now. Other issues careening toward a partisan brawl include legislation to ban human cloning and the nomination of David Satcher for surgeon general. Senate debate on Satcher’s nomination began Wednesday afternoon, with a confirmation vote probable next week.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) vehemently rejected the notion of a do-little Congress.

“We just got back. We’ve been here a week. We’re going to get our sea legs back,” he said in an interview. “I think we’re going to get a lot done this session because there are a lot of things that we cannot avoid.”

Lott cited these specifics: NATO enlargement, a review of Mexico’s efforts to curtail its drug problem, a federal budget resolution, $18 billion in new IMF funding, passage of a multibillion-dollar highway spending bill, IRS reform and the 13 annual appropriation bills.

“That,” Lott said, “is a lot in one year--even if we do nothing else.”

Yet many Republican lawmakers privately concede their party has embarrassingly little on its plate.

And more than one cited Wednesday’s vote--after many hours of debate in each house--to rename Washington’s National Airport after former President Reagan as prime evidence of the GOP’s lack of an agenda that is relevant to most Americans.

“We’re doing the airport bill because we haven’t got anything better to do,” fumed one conservative Republican senator.

Another measure of the GOP’s modest legislative ambitions for the year is the congressional calendar drawn up by the party’s leaders. It calls for Congress to meet for less than 90 days--including Mondays and Fridays when virtually no real business gets done.

“I never saw anything like that,” marveled Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

Rather than seizing the policy offensive on a broad front, Republicans have served notice that they intend to oppose Clinton’s array of new spending initiatives, which they have denounced as a return to “the era of big government” that the president renounced in 1996.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has described Clinton’s new budget as one “only a liberal could love,” and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer (R-Texas) has strongly opposed Clinton’s proposal to allow some people as young as 55 to buy into Medicare.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said such GOP resistance leads him to believe that the Republicans “are the party of no . . . a party frozen in inaction . . . frozen by special interests” urging them to oppose a patients’ “bill of rights,” Medicare expansion and an increase in the minimum wage, among other Democratic initiatives.

The GOP’s do-little approach “may be a misreading of the public mood,” according to Ornstein. “The public said: ‘Don’t screw up.’ But that doesn’t mean they told the Congress to do nothing. They want Congress to just focus on those tangible areas of adjusting policy in ways that will help their lives.”

Spratt agreed, saying Clinton’s budget “takes on problems that are vital to people’s lives.”

To be sure, GOP leaders have vowed to advance their party’s education agenda, but many of its main components, such as vouchers, are strongly opposed by the Clinton administration. Another Republican priority, tax cuts, also faces stiff White House resistance. Moreover, Republicans cannot even agree among themselves what taxes to cut.