GOP’s Small Talk of ’94 Fading

Bit by bit, Congress is undercutting the legacy of the Republican “revolution,” the Newt Gingrich-led movement whose aims included ending federal aid to poor immigrants, government subsidies for farmers and the federal budget deficit.

Gingrich and his feisty band of conservatives realized much of their agenda. But now many of the achievements are being dismantled, even as a conservative Republican reigns in the White House.

President Bush soon will sign a bill restoring food stamp benefits for hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants who were cut off from the aid six years ago. The Senate this week will join the House in voting to vastly increase farm subsidies, including payments to mohair and honey producers that had been cut off by 1996 legislation. The federal budget that Congress had balanced now is awash in red ink.

GOP Revolution

Losing Its Edge

To be sure, some of the revolution’s pillars are standing tall. The House is expected to renew soon the landmark 1996 welfare reform law, and the Bush administration has delivered on the mid-1990s crusade for big tax cuts.

But many other issues that defined the revolution have lost their edge: Term limits? Career politicians increasingly ignore them. Medicare? Republicans who once sought economies now want to expand the popular program.

Some analysts argue that the policy changes reflect, in part, the shift in thinking that has been led by Bush and his governing philosophy of compassionate conservatism. Furthermore, his business-oriented pragmatism has produced a less ideological approach.

“The 1994 Republican revolution was predicated on eliminating agencies and scaling back government, but conservatism now is headed in an entirely different direction,” said Marshall Wittmann, a political analyst at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank in Washington. “We are seeing the beginnings of big-government conservatism.”

When Republicans won control of the House and Senate in 1994, they pursued an agenda that celebrated small government, limited terms for politicians, a strong national defense, free enterprise and a balanced budget.

Part of that agenda fell by the wayside. Proposals to abolish the Education Department and other Cabinet agencies did not advance beyond the rhetorical stage. A constitutional amendment to require term limits languished. Congress passed a law giving the president a line-item veto of budget items, but it was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Other major elements of the GOP agenda, however, seemed to take root. The 1996 Freedom to Farm Act was hailed as a seminal change in policy that would wean farmers off New Deal-era government subsidies and introduce a more market-oriented approach to agriculture. The welfare reform law brought a new focus on getting the poor off the dole and into jobs. And when Congress passed a five-year plan in 1997 for balancing the budget--including new limits on the growth of Medicare spending--lawmakers were confident they had set the government on a new fiscal course.

The most durable of these achievements is likely to be the welfare law. In renewing the bill this year, Congress may impose work requirements that are, if anything, more stringent than those in the 1996 act. Democrats, however, are expected to force a debate on whether the law went too far in cutting off welfare benefits to illegal immigrants.

In pursuing that issue, Democrats are encouraged by success on another front: the pending enactment of the provision to restore federal food stamp benefits to legal immigrants. House Republicans initially resisted that retreat. But Bush supported restoration of the benefits, in keeping with his efforts to bolster the GOP’s political appeal to Latinos.

Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, called the Republicans’ shift on food stamps “the triumph of tactical politics over ideology.”

The reversal on farm policy was also driven, in part, by practical politics. Republicans were under pressure to abandon their free-market experiment because so many crucial House and Senate election fights this year are being waged in the Farm Belt. Free-market advocates see it as a regrettable signal that erstwhile GOP revolutionaries have lost the courage of their convictions.

“The Republicans in power seem to be settling into a comfortable existence” in which they are less willing to challenge the status quo, said Chris Edwards, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, a Washington think tank.

Far different forces have been at work in unraveling the balanced budget agreement, but its collapse is just as striking. Republicans who strongly supported the accord now are embracing policies that will produce a deficit for years to come: increased spending for defense and homeland security, along with continued implementation of Bush’s 10-year, $1.3-trillion tax cut.

‘It’s an Open

Buffet Table’

The attacks of Sept. 11 bear much of the responsibility: Lawmakers have concluded that defense needs are more important than balancing the budget. Still, many spending increases that have been approved or are being pushed have only a tenuous relationship to anti-terrorism efforts.

“It’s an open buffet table, and no one is checking tickets,” said Mike Franc, a former aide to House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), who now is an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

And even before Sept. 11, Congress was steadily increasing spending for domestic programs. Lawmakers had lifted some of the spending curbs imposed on Medicare in 1997. Now their focus is on providing a new prescription-drug benefit for the elderly rather than on slowing the growth of health-care spending.

The issue of term limits was an article of faith for many of the Republicans first elected in 1994. One of the first acts by the new House Republican leadership was to impose limits on the terms of committee chairmen--a reform that has remained in place. But it had less effect than proponents might have expected: Some lawmakers forced from one chairmanship simply took the helm of another panel. And many lawmakers who came to Congress pledging to serve a limited term, such as Rep. George R. Nethercutt Jr. (R-Wash.) and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), have broken that promise.

Policy shifts in other areas have been driven largely by Bush. While Gingrich & Co. came to power calling for a smaller federal role in education, Bush pushed his party to support a reform bill that vastly increases the role of the federal government in the public schools.

Mental Illness Coverage

May Be Mandated

If Congress follows Bush’s lead on other fronts, it will embrace some items that would have been anathema to the GOP a few years ago. These include requiring health insurers to improve coverage of mental illness and expanding AmeriCorps, a program to promote voluntarism that was a favorite of President Clinton.

For some veterans of the GOP revolution, this is a time for introspection. “I’m not going to sit here ... and suggest everything we did was perfect,” said Dan Meyer, a former chief of staff to Gingrich. “There’s always going to be tinkering and improvement.”

Rep. Zack Wamp (R-Tenn.), who was first elected to the House in 1994, said the changing legislative landscape reflects a natural evolution toward the political center of a conservative movement that had to push hard against an entrenched and stubborn bloc of liberal Democrats.

“It’s not an indictment of the past; it’s more a dose of reality,” Wamp said. “We have to be sensitive to changing times.”