Congress Misses Many Targets, Shifts Its Aim

The year on Capitol Hill produced so much rhetoric and so few major laws that it is tempting to call it the Seinfeld Congress. “Lots of gestures . . . not a great deal of meaning,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College.

As the congressional session staggered to an end last week, big tax cuts were dead, gun control was on life support and managed health care reform was in limbo.

But while the legislative legacy is sparse, the 1999 session proved a momentous turning point for both parties and for Congress as a whole.

For Republicans, it was the beginning of the post-Newt Gingrich era. They labored to remake themselves as defenders of Social Security but left it largely to the presidential campaign to define their party for next year’s crucial elections.

For Democrats, it was the beginning of the end of the Clinton era. They pursued an aggressive strategy aimed more at winning control of the House in 2000 than at building a post-impeachment legacy for the president.

And for both parties, it was a big step through the looking glass on fiscal matters, from decades of budget deficits to the new world of surplus politics. In this new world, even tightfisted Republicans were spending freely.

“Both parties are going through a metamorphosis,” said Marshall Wittmann, a congressional analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The Democrats are looking less to the White House and more to their own fate. Republicans are looking more to their White House nominee and becoming steely-eyed pragmatists.”

The first year of the 106th Congress came to its long-awaited end late Friday, when the Senate followed the House’s lead and passed the year-end budget deal to finance the government through next Sept. 30.

It was an anticlimactic end to a tumultuous year that gave Congress a wild ride--from the high constitutional drama of the first Senate impeachment trial in more than a century to the often-petty politics of the final budget negotiations. In between, lawmakers were confronted with a head-turning panorama of events: a war in Kosovo, a spate of highly publicized school shootings, back-to-back budget surpluses for the first time since Lennon met McCartney in the late 1950s. But through it all, the two parties seemed more adept at defining their differences for the 2000 campaign than at bridging their differences.

Both Sides Frustrated

The result was a year riddled with false starts and partisan vitriol, frustrating both sides’ efforts to get their priorities into law.

Clinton vetoed the GOP’s signature item--a sweeping tax cut plan--and no one even tried to negotiate a follow-up compromise. A bill backed by the president to give patients more rights in their dealings with managed health plans passed the House, but the final version will be written next year by a panel stacked with opponents of the measure. The Senate passed a $1-an-hour increase in the minimum wage, but Clinton threatened to veto it because it included business tax cuts that he opposed. House and Senate negotiators spent months seeking compromise on modest gun control measures but came up empty-handed.

This was just the first year of a two-year session, so no issues can be officially pronounced dead. And Congress’ 1999 legislative cupboard was not completely bare. It passed a major rewrite of the nation’s banking laws for the first time since the Great Depression. Republicans persuaded Clinton to sign a bill endorsing their defense priority--a national missile defense system. Also passed was a bill to give states more flexibility in administering federal education money.

But in the end, the GOP’s most striking accomplishment was establishment of a new principle, not passage of a new law. The Republicans promised--and won Democratic backing--to end the long-standing budgetary practice of using Social Security revenues to finance other parts of government.

Independent budget analysts question whether the GOP’s year-end budget deal with Clinton met that goal. But mere acceptance of that idea as a goal was a big shift in government fiscal policy. It had the effect of imposing a new limit on lawmakers’ appetite for additional spending and big tax cuts at a time when burgeoning surpluses beckoned.

“I think it is historic,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said of the commitment to safeguard Social Security money. “It is going to be difficult for either party to go back at any time in the future and acknowledge that they are using the Social Security trust funds.”

As a political matter, the Republican emphasis on Social Security represented a bold effort to deflect Democrats’ long-standing questioning of the GOP commitment to the retirement program. The Republican embrace of Social Security also was the cornerstone of a strategy to reorient the party after its surprising setbacks in the 1998 elections and the subsequent resignation of Gingrich, the House speaker who for many voters had come to symbolize political polarization.

Left with a razor-thin House majority, Republicans could aspire to little more than survival. Their first job was to put impeachment behind them. Polls early this year showed the GOP suffering because voters identified them with little more than their effort to kick Clinton out of office. Their next job was to avoid the kind of self-inflicted political wounds that Gingrich was prone to inflict. It was a “do-no-harm” strategy, as GOP consultant Ed Gillespie put it.

Casting around for an issue to unify the party, Republicans rallied around an old standby: tax cuts. They passed a $792-billion tax-relief package but then found many of their constituents lukewarm about the issue. After Clinton vetoed the bill, the GOP took up the cause of fencing off Social Security revenues as the central principle of this fall’s budget debate.

It was a striking measure of how much the Republican focus had changed in the five years since the party won control of Congress amid pledges to dismantle the welfare state.

“Yesterday’s revolutionaries have become today’s blurry-eyed pragmatists,” said Wittmann of the Heritage Foundation.

Hoping Attention Will Be Diverted

Some GOP lawmakers are worried that they don’t have more to show for the year. But they are candidly counting on the presidential contest to eclipse such concerns.

“Within just a few short weeks now, the whole world will turn its attention exclusively to what the presidential candidates are saying,” House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) said recently. “I’m sort of looking forward to that.”

While the GOP leaders were hobbled by their narrow majority and the turmoil of transition, so too did Clinton lack the clout to dominate the agenda as he once had.

“The normal difficulty that’s encountered with a president late in his second term getting legislation through Congress is compounded by a residue of ill feeling from the impeachment trial,” said Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

In the wake of impeachment, many Republicans openly challenged Clinton on the war in Kosovo, ignoring the tradition of deference to the presidency on matters of war and peace. Then, in September, the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty--the first major international pact to suffer such a fate since the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.

With neither Clinton nor the Republicans able to exercise the kind of strong leadership that would have been needed to craft compromises on major issues, it soon became clear that congressional Democrats were not about to make it any easier.

Consumed by the prospect of winning back control of the House--and, at the least, cutting into the GOP’s Senate majority--Democrats had little incentive to compromise on marquee issues like gun control, the minimum wage and managed health care reform.

“We’re going to keep fighting for the right bill,” said Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “If we win, fine. If we can’t, we’ll take back the House and then win it.”

While Clinton once harbored hopes of burnishing his legacy with a bipartisan agreement to revamp Medicare and Social Security, these political interests of congressional Democrats--his staunch backers during impeachment proceedings--made it harder for him to strike compromises on those long-term issues.

Even the prospect that budget surpluses may continue to grow over the next decade did little to grease the wheels of compromise. On the overarching question of what Congress should do with the money, the two sides fought largely to a draw. Clinton vetoed the GOP tax cut plan; Republicans capped Democratic spending ambitions by fencing off Social Security revenues.

But in this instance, stalemate had what many budget experts said was a salutary effect: Surplus money not spent or given back in tax cuts has been used to reduce the national debt.

“There clearly is no consensus yet on the surplus,” said Robert Bixby, head of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that promotes fiscal restraint. “But that’s a good thing. The major accomplishment [by Congress] was doing nothing with the surplus.”