George Bush's House Training - The president is learning to work with his party in Congress

National Review, August 20, 2001 by Byron York

'I would say Johnny is improving," says one senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill, a bit hopefully. "He's learning to work better with others."

"Johnny," in this case, is the president of the United States, and in the view of some congressional Republicans, he is finally-after a rocky start-beginning to figure out that he will have to try harder to keep conservative lawmakers happy if he is going to pass the legislation he wants. At least, there are some encouraging signs.

Among them, according to Hill Republicans, is a greater White House attentiveness to conservative concerns-it's far more common now for administration officials to ask GOP lawmakers what they think about issues, something that didn't happen as much a few months ago. The White House is also more likely to tell Republicans on the Hill about administration plans before they appear in the newspaper, another rarity in the past. And the president himself is showing a greater interest in the details of legislation, meeting with House leaders and, on July 31, going to the Capitol for his first visit with Senate Republicans.

Those are all good things, Republicans say, but they have a tougher time when asked for any concrete results from the newly solicitous White House attitude. "Hmm," says another conservative aide. A long pause. "I'm trying to think."

For those without an optimistic bent, there are still plenty of reasons to worry. Consider these examples, large and small, of recent White House missteps with its Republican allies in Congress. Last month, the administration floated the idea of legalizing the status of millions of illegal Mexican immigrants. It was big news, but it blindsided Republicans on the Hill; the White House hadn't thought to run it past them. Whatever they felt about the idea itself, many in the GOP were angered by the administration's handling of the matter (although it wasn't as bad as when the White House ignored Congress and unilaterally set a date to end U.S. military bombing exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques).

In another instance, there was a vote July 27 on an amendment, sponsored by House Democratic whip David Bonior, to force the administration to adopt the last-minute standards left by the Clinton administration concerning arsenic in drinking water. It's an issue that has bedeviled the Bush White House almost since Inauguration Day, and the vote had the potential to deliver the final blow to the president's plan to come up with his own arsenic standard. But the White House didn't mount any effort to win, and the amendment passed by the narrowest possible majority. Free from administration pressure, 19 Republicans voted with Bonior-and 20 GOP representatives didn't vote at all (some were headed home for the weekend when the voting took place at about two o'clock on a Friday afternoon). The story-another defeat for Bush-made dozens of front pages across the country the next day.

Then there was the president's energy plan, which the White House kept a secret from its friends on the Hill. "We begged them to tell us what was going on and they wouldn't," says the senior GOP aide. "We read about it in the newspaper." Then, when Vice President Dick Cheney unveiled the plan, members of Congress asked the obvious political questions: What's in it for me? What can I take back to my district and tell voters? The answer from the White House was . . . nothing, basically. Republicans had nightmares of being hammered by constituents during the August recess, with little to say to defend themselves. They're still having them.

And all that angst is on top of what remains the source of virtually all conservative unhappiness with the White House-the education bill. Remember when the president, desperately wanting to attract Democratic support for his schools proposal, bent over backward to make liberal Democratic representative George Miller happy? Well, it made a lot of Republicans very unhappy. "For a couple of months, the view was that they were kissin' the Democrats' a** and kickin' ours," says the senior aide. "We didn't get screwed this badly by Bill Clinton." Conservatives believed, correctly, that the White House strategy was to win Democrats and moderate Republicans and then muscle conservatives into supporting the bill. It was a strategy guaranteed to produce resentment, and it did. Now, all that's left to do is try to fix some of the bill's worst excesses, most importantly its out-of-control spending, before it heads to the White House for the president's signature.

To many Republicans, the education experience proved that Bush's initial approach to working with the House-downplaying the Right and Left and going after the center-was fundamentally unworkable. The problem is that the president needs 218 votes to win, and there are not 218 centrists in the House of Representatives. If he starts off begging for Democratic support, he'll find himself under pressure to give up more and more. On the other hand, if he starts off on the right, he wins about 140 votes from the get-go, and can then begin the process of compromising to get the right-of-center and slightly right-of-center and really truly center votes. Then, when he gets to 218, he probably hasn't angered too many of his supporters in the process.