Oh what a beautiful morning - Republican victory in 1994 midterm elections - Column

National Review, Dec 19, 1994 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Senator Dole said that Republicans must not gloat. On the other hand Tom Wolfe, shortly after the Soviet Union capitulated, addressed an assembly of lifelong Cold Warriors and said--Why not gloat? To gloat is to express great pleasure, "often malicious." The particular temptation to gloat last Tuesday as the returns floated in and Democrat after Democrat glugged down under the tidal wave was generated by the nature of the rhetoric of the losers. Bill Clinton cannot say "John hit the baseball," without insinuating a moral sentiment into the datum. John bit the baseball, which is testimony to John's fine health and to the rigors of exercise and to the joys of a great sport in which millions of Americans engage with such evident pleasure . . . Snore time indeed, and so help me the impulse arises (we are human) to worry about the baseball.

Has no one given any thought to how you'd feel if you were a baseball? It's all very well to talk about John hitting the baseball, but baseballs represent an ecological asset and there has to be husbandry in dissipating national assets. Snore. I mean, that's how Bill Clinton sounds, and he sounds all the time, everywhere, on every issue, and when he will stop knoweth not the listener and, one began to suspect toward midnight on Tuesday, a lot of voters.

Okay, so a decent interval to gloat, to express great pleasure and a touch of malice directed at those who always represent themselves as speaking for the people, while us-types speak only for special interests. Special interests like, it transpires, the majority of the American people.

Now Newt Gingrich has made the question, Where do we go from here? wonderfully explicit. He has that agenda to which he and all Republican congressional aspirants subscribed in September. Democratic pundits oohed with pleasure at the Contract with America when it was enunciated. Their reasoning was that the mere enumeration of the 10 goals gave the Democrats something to chew on, a great relief over the alternative of defending Clinton, which was proving a sweaty exercise with exiguous benefits. Gingrich was undismayed by the criticism and reiterated the legislative, and in some cases constitutional, goals.

The parliamentary situation is this: Assuming that every Republican voted one by one in favor of the agenda, both in the House and in the Senate, all the items on the agenda would be passed. If President Clinton vetoed every measure and every Democrat in the House and in the Senate voted against the agenda, the Republicans would be without sufficient votes to override the veto. But it is by no means predictable either that every single Republican senator will go along with every item on the agenda (the Contract was made with members of the House of Representatives and contenders for House seats); nor is it by any means to be supposed that every Democrat will reject the agenda.

Then too there is piquancy in the provision that would give to the President a line-item veto. Congress could pass the line-item number, the President could veto it, Congress could override: and the President could thenceforward decline to exercise the privilege given him.

And of course a term-limitation amendment is a constitutional question, and constitutional initiatives don't stop at the White House for confirmation. They go directly to the states. The question of term limitation is complicated by varying views on its constitutionality. There is the school that says it is absolutely up to the states, and already 22 states have voted in favor of term limitation. A second school says it is up to Congress, since it sets its own rules. A third school insists that not even Congress can deny to the voters of any congressional district the right to send whomever they wish to Congress, provided he/she is 25 years old. To be sure, Congress--but here we get into constitutional fine-tuning that, for the most part, should be exercised only in law-school seminars--could refuse to seat a congressman if he had already served the proposed limit of 12 years.

Mr. Gingrich is definitely the man of the hour, and for those who have an occasional taste for political grand opera, it is simply too gratifying for words to know that he will replace the man who only a little over a year ago when the budget bill was passed announced that finally we had come to the end of the era of Ronald Reagan.