A Bruised Clinton Prepares to Grab Legislative Victory

It’s not the ending anyone would have predicted to a season of turmoil in Washington. But just days after the House voted to begin an impeachment inquiry against him, President Clinton is closing out the legislative year with a chance to claim victory on his top domestic priority--and to deny Republicans success on theirs.

Republicans, faced with staunch opposition from Clinton, recently abandoned hopes for the tax cut many in the GOP had expected would be a cornerstone of their fall campaign. And now, the Republican Congress appears poised to include in the government’s final budget package new money for several of Clinton’s key domestic initiatives--including more than $1 billion in funds for hiring teachers to reduce classroom sizes, Clinton’s top goal.

The jockeying between Clinton and Republicans continued Tuesday, as White House and congressional negotiators sought agreement on a budget that would keep the government running for the coming year and allow lawmakers to adjourn for the year. As the talks dragged on, Republicans began to suspect that Democrats were deliberately slowing the pace because they saw political advantage in staying in Washington and battling the GOP over policy rather than returning home to answer questions about Clinton.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who Monday had said that an agreement was within reach, was grim as he emerged from negotiations late Tuesday afternoon. “I am much less optimistic than I was this morning,” Gingrich said.

Despite Gingrich’s comments, the two sides had narrowed so much ground this week--and Republicans appeared so leery of allowing Clinton to precipitate another government shutdown--that an accord still appeared inevitable by week’s end.

Aside from showing the enormous leverage even a weakened president can exert in legislative showdowns, the GOP’s generally conciliatory approach in the talks underscores an electoral strategy generating growing controversy inside the party.

GOP Reluctant to Engage in Policy Fights

Confident that their own voters are motivated to register their disgust at Clinton’s behavior with Monica S. Lewinsky, Republicans have become extremely reluctant to provide the president with any policy conflicts that might increase turnout in the Nov. 3 election among otherwise disillusioned Democrats. In that way, Republicans hope to gain seats and strengthen their hand for policy confrontations with Clinton.

But some conservatives fret that a backlash against impeachment by Democratic partisans may already have rendered this strategy obsolete--while leaving Republicans with few issues to trumpet to their own base.

“It all comes down to who goes to the polls,” said Marshall Wittmann, director of congressional relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That is the ultimate judgment on whose strategy was accurate.”

The flurry of Republican concessions in the budget talks marks a distinct turn from the GOP’s approach since the summer of 1997 when the two parties reached a sweeping deal to balance the federal budget. After conservatives loudly complained that the deal yielded too much ground to Clinton, Republicans systematically stymied the president’s initiatives through most of 1998.

Earlier this year, congressional Republicans voted down Clinton’s proposals to build more schools and subsidize more after-school programs, rejected his call for sweeping anti-smoking legislation and an increase in the minimum wage, killed campaign finance legislation that he supported and shelved without serious consideration his plan to open Medicare to the near elderly. Just five days ago, the Senate officially voted down another of Clinton’s top priorities: the so-called “patient’s bill of rights” legislation that would increase regulation of health maintenance organizations.

In turn, Clinton has vetoed several of the GOP’s priorities, including proposals to test school vouchers in the District of Columbia, ban “partial-birth” abortions and create tax-favored accounts that parents could use to help pay private-school tuition.

Clinton’s successes this week are not sweeping enough to change the basic verdict on this Congress as a session in which defeats substantially outnumbered victories for both sides.

But he has gained enough ground to generate considerable hand-wringing among conservatives. They did not expect a month that began with a House vote to investigate impeachment to end with Congress agreeing to the president’s demands for billions of dollars in new spending for class size reduction, after-school programs, charter schools, summer jobs, housing vouchers for welfare recipients and the International Monetary Fund.

“If conservatives around the country were not so preoccupied with casting a vote against Clinton on Nov. 3, they’d be pretty upset about what is going on this week in Washington with the Republican Congress,” said Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine.

Education is one of the issues sticking in the throats of conservatives. After spending most of the year opposing Clinton’s proposal to provide $1.1 billion to reduce class size by hiring 100,000 new teachers, Republicans have agreed to match his proposal dollar for dollar in a counterproposal that differs only in giving schools some flexibility to use the money for special education or purposes other than hiring teachers.

“Republicans are for schools,” Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) said Tuesday in formally unveiling the GOP proposal. “The debate now is over who gets to spend that money.”

That difference remains perhaps the most stubborn disagreement in the final talks. Still--after months of insisting that reducing class size was a state and not a federal responsibility--an argument about who controls new federal money is far from the debate the GOP anticipated at this point.

On taxes, too, Republicans now find themselves on unexpected terrain--trying merely to salvage a $9.2-billion extension of existing tax breaks. And even that modest measure, approved by the House, may die in the Senate.

For most of the year, Republican tax-cutting hopes had ascended step-by-step with the growing estimates of the federal budget surplus. When new budget surplus estimates reached $1.6 billion over 10 years, House GOP leaders offered plans to cut taxes by $700 billion.

But faced with lukewarm Senate support and continuing Clinton threats to veto any tax cut that drew on the budget surplus--which he has proposed to reserve until Congress reforms Social Security--House tax writers settled for an $80-billion tax cut package in September. Yet even that proved too much for the Senate Republican leaders, who quietly shelved the proposal last week.

“People were afraid of the Clinton rhetoric on Social Security,” said Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.).

Fear, Confidence Within the GOP

In fact, the decision to shelve the tax cut proposal--like the spending concessions to Clinton in the final budget negotiations--reflects both fear and confidence inside the GOP.

The confidence derives from the belief that Republicans will enjoy a turnout advantage that produces gains in November--so long as they do not allow Clinton to rock the boat with a galvanizing policy argument.

Yet, many conservative observers noted, buried inside that calculation is an underlying fear about the GOP’s capacity to win policy disputes with the president. The most immediate problem is fear of reprising the government shutdown of 1995-96, which revived Clinton’s presidency. But Kristol, among others, sees a broader dilemma at work in the Republican reluctance to confront Clinton on education and other issues.

“Clinton’s weakness over the past year has masked a real problem on the Republican side--which is that they [GOP leaders] haven’t developed a coherent governing philosophy or strategy,” Kristol said.

For that reason, many conservative activists do not expect a more energetic agenda from congressional Republicans next year, unless they make gains next month much larger than now predicted. And with Clinton facing a potentially protracted impeachment inquiry, few Democrats expect him to breathe much life into the parts of his policy agenda that he could not disinter in the final hours of this legislative session.

“Barring an absolute blowout by Republicans in November,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Wittmann, “I think we are in for two more years of relative inaction.”