At a House Democratic Caucus meeting last week, a veteran West Coast lawmaker elicited raucous laughter from sympathetic colleagues when he complained, "I'm tired of my family and want to get back to work." Little wonder. After taking one of the longest recesses in recent history, Congress returned in late January to a pace so leisurely that even some lawmakers have begun to joke that they're not earning their $136,673 salaries. "The Republicans want to go fishing," one well-connected GOP lobbyist quipped, "and they want Ken Starr to do more fishing."
All across Washington, this is the year to plan long vacations and midweek dinners at home. With roughly 60 work days left on the legislative calendar before adjournment, it's no secret that this city's power brokers aren't breaking a sweat to move legislation. Using the go-go economy and public contentment as justification, lawmakers from both parties think they can afford to play it safe, pass a few must-do bills and then head home to ride a wave of incumbency toward November's midterm elections. "Congress is taking this session pass-fail," said Charles Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report. "They are doing the bare minimum to get by."
There's plenty of blame--or credit, depending on your point of view--to go around. President Clinton has a long policy wish list for 1998. But the GOP majority on Capitol Hill isn't much impressed by his clout or salesmanship these days, and the extensive globe-trotting he's got planned will mean he's missing-in-action for big chunks of time. Even the President's aides concede that there's little resemblance between what Clinton wants and what will pass.
Because the Republicans control the legislative reins, they are chiefly responsible for the slowdown strategy, which has been particularly conspicuous in the House. Gone are the frenetic GOP pace and the strident rhetoric of 1995 and early 1996, and gone is the limited bipartisanship that followed. The legislative results of the Republican revolution--a balanced budget, welfare reform, tax cuts--may have been heartening to conservatives, but seeing Clinton and the Democrats steal the credit has made them cringe.
The truth is, Republicans, Democrats and the President are all racking up points in public opinion surveys for working together to solve the country's problems. Everyone's ratings are up. "We are the most popular Congress in the history of polling," House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., declared in an interview this week. "Maybe what we are doing is calmly and methodically thinking through what we do next."
Some Republicans think they can enjoy a pensive siesta now and put some key bills off until manana, when they hope the President will be weakened by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's investigation, and disheartened Democrats will have little room to maneuver. "There is no need for haste, given that Democrats won't get stronger in coming months," said Gingrich spokeswoman Christina Martin.
Republicans, not incidentally, are also fairly confident about Election Day: They've been outdoing the Democrats in fund raising and candidate recruitment in many states, and most political analysts expect they'll maintain control of both the House and the Senate.
Democrats can't do much about the legislative pace except complain about what could have been. That will turn out to be a central part of their party's political strategy for the year. At the White House, Clinton's advisers are already blaming Republicans for playing stall-the-ball politics, especially on tobacco settlement legislation the President sorely wants. "Politics has trumped progress or policy," said Rahm I. Emanuel, Clinton's senior policy adviser, in an interview. "The lack of a coherent, competing agenda, or an affirmative agenda, has made [the Republicans] fall back on the last line of defense, which is an agenda of rejection."
House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo., who has his eyes on both the midterm elections and the 2000 presidential race, is also taking his shots early. "This is turning out to be a do-nothing Congress," he recently told reporters. "We are not here getting the job of the people done, and I think that is deplorable."
Maybe so, but a less-than-grueling workload isn't so surprising in an election year when a relatively satisfied public prefers to go slow. "I don't really see a groundswell of public support for a lot of legislation," said Stephen J. Wayne, a government professor at Georgetown University. "People are pretty content with the way things are going, both domestically and abroad. If it's not broke, you don't have to fix it."
The problem for both parties is that it's hard to cater to a contented public while also trying to sharpen distinctions between Republicans and Democrats. "The point for Republicans is, they have a very delicate balance," said a GOP pollster. "They want to appeal to the Republican base, which is not the Religious Right, it's the fiscal conservatives who are rattling the sabers and saying, 'Where's my tax cut?' ... But the people in the center like this nonconfrontational atmosphere, and it's difficult to do both.
"It's do-able," the pollster added, "but they have to try to tiptoe very carefully through the year, run good races and hold onto their majorities."
Republicans Stay in Their Foxholes
For months, Republicans have acknowledged that they've got two big motives in limiting their time in Washington this year: to let Members go home more often to remind voters of their accomplishments, and to reduce the risk of the inside-the-Beltway blowups that have plagued the GOP.
The GOP is reluctant to tempt fate by tackling complex new initiatives before the November elections. So passing popular, narrowly focused bills--such as one to overhaul the much-maligned Internal Revenue Service--is a no-brainer. But more-nettlesome measures requiring extensive negotiations are less likely to hit the President's desk. "Popularity is a function of minimalism," said a Republican lobbyist, who added that the congressional GOP strategy is: "The less we're here, the less we do, the less our heads rise above the foxhole, the more content the country seemingly is."
Critics contend that the light schedule has left Members too little time to do business. Last year's Nov. 13 adjournment--the earliest closing in a nonelection year since 1965--and the frequent two-day workweeks since Congress reconvened on Jan. 27 have left few opportunities for Members of either party to plan or engage in serious discussions.
"The Republicans' calculation is that they can ride out this year without doing anything, except some little things on big issues," complained a House Democratic leadership aide. "It limits consensus-building, because we can't bring Members together if there are no other meetings."
Complaints that Congress is poorly organized to address a multitude of competing priorities are nothing new. No matter who holds the majority, lawmakers typically start the year slowly but by the end are toiling late into the night and on weekends. Congress was quiet early in 1996, too, but then suddenly became energized in midsummer, passing a series of big proposals--including welfare reform and a minimum-wage hike--before heading to the national political conventions.
The current go-slow approach is more the creation of House, rather than Senate, Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., recently has been in mid-session form, as he's detailed a loaded--indeed, optimistic--floor schedule for his chamber. Yet the Senate's tradition of unlimited debate often means it spends weeks on a bill that the House can pass in an afternoon. And, as with the recent case of campaign finance reform debate, the process can be futile.
House Republican leaders--always mindful of the narrowness of their 227-203 majority--are more wary of pressing ahead on issues that could expose their internal divisions. "The best way to avoid future mistakes is not to be in [session] many days," said a GOP lobbyist.
In hopes of drawing further lines between the two parties, GOP lawmakers plan to beat the drum for sweeping tax reform, tax breaks for private-school tuition, other school-choice proposals and stiffer drug laws.
No matter how much the majority party wants to discourage time-consuming floor conflicts, however, the legislative calendar sometimes takes on a life of its own. Controversies surrounding the annual must-pass budget and appropriations bills are sure to eat up most of the little time that lawmakers are in town.
Budget expert Stanley Collender of the New York public relations firm Burson-Marsteller predicted Republicans will get bogged down in the tantalizing world of budget surpluses later this year if the estimates of fiscal 1999's surplus shoot up to $50 billion, as some expect. Should they spend a surplus on tax cuts? Should they pay down the debt? "That's going to be a real challenge for the leadership," Collender said. "They don't know what they want to do."
And although many Republicans would prefer, for instance, to avoid the always-divisive debate on 50-state formulas for divvying up highway funding, they've been under pressure from governors to reauthorize surface transportation programs, which Congress put off resolving last year. Gingrich now says he expects agreement on that legislation this spring.
Whether Republicans will step up to the plate on tobacco legislation--another highly complex topic--remains uncertain. Clinton wants to force action by linking popular spending proposals to approval of a tobacco bill, but the GOP has criticized the White House's failure to present a plan. In response, the President's top advisers say any legislation they write and send to Capitol Hill will automatically die a politicized death.
More immediately, some insiders have worried about international implications of the GOP delay in handling Clinton's request to shore up the International Monetary Fund's efforts to calm jittery Asian markets.
After weeks of saying they were awaiting a presidential initiative, top Republican leaders recently have considered steps to include the IMF funding in a catch-all spending bill. But with the lengthy Easter recess approaching, they may have left themselves too little time to come up with the votes needed to pass the controversial package.
Clinton Strategy: Bag His Limit
The President opened the year determined to push a poll-tested legislative agenda designed to appeal to the traditional base of the Democratic Party, as well as to the general public.
Before Christmas, the press wrote that Clinton "was more focused on golf than on governing," said newsletter editor Cook. But after New Year's, "he came forward with a very aggressive agenda, most of which would never happen, but it was stuff that sounded good, and voters seemed to like it."
Clinton thinks he can lure Republicans into passing a few important bills in 1998 because the issues have voter appeal--something on education, for instance, or perhaps protections for patients in managed care health plans--and spend the rest of the time bashing the GOP for ducking other bills. In the process, according to White House officials, Clinton wants to patch up the cracks in Democratic unity left over from 1997's fights over the budget and fast-track trade authority.
Clinton also wants to ward off the inevitable lame-duck label for as long as he can. With the unknown outcome of the Monica Lewinsky investigation hanging over him, he's even more resolved to look and act like a policy activist, even if Republicans in Congress aren't listening.
Clinton's plan--to try to reel in four or five legislative victories that are important for the average Joe and are winners for Democratic candidates--is particularly helpful to the party because of the intern scandal. "It's even more important for [Clinton] to have issues for Democrats to work on, because you haven't seen them jumping to his defense," said Donna B. Victoria, a Democratic pollster with Lauer, Lalley, Victoria Inc.
Since taking the initiative with the State of the Union address and his budget, Clinton has left it to lawmakers to sort out the subsequent legislation, with help behind the scenes from Administration officials. The President, meanwhile, has been on a nearly one-event-a-day schedule, championing elements of his policy agenda and avoiding, for the most part, partisan slams on Republicans. "The Administration is trying to get a sense of where the scandal is going, where the Republicans are going and what the public is willing to support, before it weighs in with more than rhetoric," said Georgetown's Wayne.
It is too early to predict what kind of drag effect, if any, the Lewinsky investigation will have on legislative momentum this year, analysts said. And overconfident Republicans run the risk that an impeachment inquiry that appears to be mostly about sex could backfire on them. One line of thinking is that Clinton has taken the long view on policy making, writing off much of this year in favor of getting entitlement reform in 1999. Fixing Social Security and Medicare--which the President has said he wants to tackle next year--are the prizes many analysts think Clinton has in his legacy-occupied mind. It's a job only a lame-duck politician could pull off a year before a presidential election, political analysts say. But it would still be a tall order.
The White House denies that the President and congressional Democrats are taking a pass this year, arguing that GOP disorganization has forced them to take a more cautious approach--so far. "As the election comes nearer," Emanuel said, "the election has an ability to focus the mind."
Because Republicans are so eager to get out of Washington early this year, congressional Democrats expect Clinton to use his signature or his veto pens to try to keep Congress in town long enough to get some of his initiatives done. That's particularly true of the 13 appropriations measures that are supposed to be completed by Oct. 1.
The public interest will not be greatly harmed if Congress and the White House don't do much this year. Other than preventing a financial meltdown in Asia and standing tall against Saddam Hussein, there is little now that has an air of urgency.
For Clinton, the risks of a quiet legislative year are modest. In some cases, he can act administratively in the absence of legislation. He can work incrementally to try to enact small successes that add up to larger achievements. He can veto bills he doesn't like and use the bully pulpit to explain why. And he can claim credit for trying, while painting Republicans as irresponsible or as obstructionists.
The worst things that could happen to Clinton this year include soured relations with the GOP that taint the prospects for 1999; dramatic Republican triumphs in November; a cataclysmic economic or international event that erodes his authority; and criminal implications in Starr's probe.
But a President with high approval ratings is hard to beat. "It has been a skill of the Administration since 1994 to deflect criticism by pointing to others, whether it's Gingrich or Bob Dole or Ken Starr, and say, 'The President's trying to do his job, and these guys are getting in the way,' " Wayne said.
But congressional Republicans, enjoying their own revival in the polls, are not spooked by Clinton. Gingrich and Lott are content to do just enough work this year, but not too much. "We will do what's right for the American people," the Speaker said.
Senior editor W. John Moore contributed to this story.
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