Bush, Rivals Find It Hard to Flex Muscles Amid Political Parity

What happens when a national election ends in a tie?

Take a look at Washington for the last few weeks--where the left and right have taken turns raging in frustration on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

In the Senate Education Committee earlier this month, Democrats blocked President Bush’s plan to create federally funded school vouchers. Republicans, in turn, blocked Democratic proposals to hire more teachers and build more schools.

Two weeks ago, environmentalists fumed when an uprising among GOP conservatives led Bush to back off his campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Last week, energy producers fumed when an uprising among GOP moderates forced the House Budget Committee to shelve Bush’s plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Legislators working to strengthen the rights of patients in health maintenance organizations were stymied last week when Bush threatened to veto the bill with the broadest support--a bipartisan plan sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass). But Sens. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and John B. Breaux (D-La.), sponsors of the legislation the White House prefers, have been stymied by their inability to attract enough support, particularly among Democrats.

This same pattern of knife’s-edge balance is apparent on virtually every major issue before Congress. Two months into Bush’s presidency, it is becoming obvious that power in Washington is so closely divided that neither side can consistently impose its will on the other.

All this follows a 2000 election that produced the closest thing to a tie--from the results in the presidential race to the makeup of Congress--that the country has seen in more than a century. Gradually, but apparently inexorably, that underlying political parity is shaping a legislative environment generally resistant to sweeping change--and sometimes to any change at all.

“Because the House and Senate majorities are so narrow, minorities in both parties can essentially cast vetoes,” said University of Akron political scientist John C. Green.

On this unstable terrain, most analysts agree Bush still holds the highest ground. He has scored some early legislative victories, and his ideas shape the range of the possible more than anyone else’s. On most issues, such as taxes and education, the question is how far to move in the direction that Bush prefers.

But it is already clear that on many issues Bush may not be able to move nearly as far as he would like--that his presidency may be less blitzkrieg than trench warfare, with advances on one front offset by reversals on another. In just the last few days, Bush has seen Congress not only set back his plan to drill in the Arctic wilderness area but emphatically reject a cornerstone of his approach to campaign finance reform and signal resistance toward a central element of his initiative to increase government cooperation with faith-based charities.

“Bush has had a good first two months, and that’s led some Republicans to lose sight of the underlying structural situation: that Republicans barely have a functional majority in the House or the Senate, and didn’t win the popular vote for the president,” said GOP strategist William Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. “There are lots of issues out there where Republicans are going to have to play defense.”

If anything, the Democratic situation is even more precarious. While Democrats have already shown they can force Bush to moderate his plans, they have not demonstrated the capacity to generate legislative majorities for their own alternatives.

In contrast, on several early tests the narrow GOP congressional majority has shown impressive unity in pushing through its plans. That discipline was apparent in the approval of legislation to repeal a Clinton administration regulation on repetitive stress injuries, the rewriting of bankruptcy laws and the nearly party-line House vote to approve Bush’s plan for an across-the-board reduction in income tax rates.

Still, the defining characteristic of the closely divided political environment may be a rough balance between success and disappointment; the list of early Bush victories is easily matched by the list of White House priorities that have already been shelved or set back. Among the early disappointments for the new administration:

* Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, already has declared that the votes don’t exist to even consider the sweeping Medicare restructuring Bush proposed as a candidate. Likewise, only one Senate Democrat (Breaux) now supports Bush’s plan to carve out personal investment accounts from Social Security, which leaves the plan with little prospect of approval.

* By a greater than 2-1 majority, the Senate voted Wednesday to reject the key element of Bush’s campaign finance reform plan--the so-called paycheck protection provision that would require unions and corporations to receive permission from members and shareholders before using their money for political purposes.

* On the same day, the House Budget Committee refused to include anticipated revenue from drilling in the Arctic refuge in its 2002 budget plan; Senate Republicans indicated they were likely to take the same course. That greatly complicates the administration’s hope of opening the refuge to oil drilling because any legislation to do so would now require the 60 votes it takes to break a Senate filibuster rather than the 50 required to pass a budget bill.

* When introducing a bill last week embodying Bush’s call for new tax breaks to stimulate charitable donations, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) pointedly omitted the other central component of Bush’s plan: measures to make faith-based charities eligible to compete for more government contracts. Lieberman told reporters that more time was needed to resolve doubts about whether the faith-based provision would impinge on the separation of church and state.

* On his education bill, the president suffered erosion from left and right during committee action earlier this month. Under pressure from Republicans fearful of federal intrusion, Bush watered down the student testing provisions at the heart of his accountability proposals. And with both Democrats and moderate Republicans resisting, the bill dropped Bush’s proposal to provide private school vouchers to low-income parents whose children attend poorly performing public schools. Now, congressional sources say, the administration is trying to win support for a scaled-back voucher demonstration project, and even that is uncertain.

* Senate Republican leaders have acknowledged that they will be forced to bring Bush’s tax and budget plan directly to the floor next month because they lack the votes to move it out of the Senate Budget Committee. Once it gets there, the White House will face a challenge from a bipartisan centrist alliance insisting that the tax plan include a trigger that would automatically block future income tax rate reductions if the surpluses don’t prove as large as projected. The White House staunchly opposes the idea, but Grassley has said Bush may have to accept some version to pass the bill.

In the end, Bush is likely to enjoy a measurable victory on his tax cut: Momentum is gathering to try to stimulate the economy with a broad reduction in the tax rates. But he still may need to offer significant concessions to build a Senate majority; centrist legislators in both parties who are eager to hold down the plan’s overall cost are pushing to delay or scale back the president’s proposals to repeal the estate tax and reduce taxes for married couples.

On many other issues, unless the two sides can bridge their differences, the prognosis may be parallel frustration. Take, for instance, the so-called patients’ bill of rights legislation. With McCain endorsing the bill--and with last fall’s election giving Democrats five new Senate votes--sponsors of the most sweeping legislation believed they had the support to overcome a possible Senate filibuster. But Bush last Wednesday flatly declared that he would veto the bill, which he charged would invite “frivolous litigation.”

Instead, the White House signaled its support for the more limited alternative crafted by Breaux and Frist. But the two senators have delayed introducing their bill because they have been unable to find even a second Democrat to co-sponsor it.

Kristol, the GOP strategist, believes that one side will eventually gain the edge in the multi-front standoff. “It’s both an evenly matched moment and a fluid moment. I don’t think it’s a stable situation; I can imagine Bush moving skillfully and aggressively and dominating the agenda, and I think the opposite could happen too.”

Yet others believe that, like the stalemated combatants in the trench warfare of World War I, neither side is likely to “break out” to a sustained advantage. “If you look at American history, the only times you get truly major movements are after some kind of electoral landslide where somebody can claim a mandate: Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan,” said Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina.

In this climate of parity, Fiorina argued, the key to success for Bush will be displaying a willingness to compromise with critics on all sides. After 2000’s extraordinarily close election, he said, Bush won’t succeed unless he recognizes that “the only mandate is to be reasonable and make some progress.”