Knee-capped: the highway bill is the worst example of Republican drift from fiscal conservatism

National Review, March 9, 1998 by Stephen Moore

Mr. Moore is director of fiscal-policy studies at the Cato Institute and an NR contributing editor.

Just nine months after approval of the much-celebrated budget deal of 1997, Congress is already plotting to bust the expenditure caps for 1999. Given the ignominious fate of the past four bi-partisan budget deals in Washington, this rush was entirely predictable. Members of Congress can't help themselves; it's in their nature.

What is surprising is that it's a new breed of fiscally reckless congressional Republicans who are leading the spending charge. In a series of closed-door House Republican leadership meetings over the past two weeks, Speaker Newt Gingrich and Transportation Committee Chairman Bud Shuster have been lobbying to lift the expenditure limits by as much as $35 billion to accommodate the most expensive highway bill in history. Even the fiercest critics of the 1997 budget deal -- myself included -- never expected the five-year deal to unravel quite so quickly.

The GOP's budget hawks are outnumbered. Leading the opposition to the spending scheme have been Whip Tom Delay, Policy Committee Chairman Chris Cox, Conference Chairman John Boehner, Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, and Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston. Privately each has complained that they represent a minority position not just in Congress, but inside the Republican conference.

"To bust the spending caps would be a betrayal of promises we made to the American people," complains Mr. Kasich. Betrayal is the right word. On February 5 Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner fired off a terse letter to Gingrich stating that raising the spending caps "would be tantamount to an act of political war against the conservative movement" and has "all the makings of a 'read my lips' broken promise."

It was almost precisely a year ago that Newt Gingrich was arm-twisting conservatives to support the budget deal with emphatic assurances that the spending caps would be inviolable. "This budget deal locks the Democrats into a five-year fiscal straitjacket," Gingrich crowed to a Capitol Hill gathering of budget-deal skeptics from Heritage, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy.

But Bud Shuster certainly doesn't feel constrained. His pork-filled highway bill exceeds the budget deal's five-year outlay targets by an estimated $30 to $35 billion. The Shuster bill is arguably the most irresponsible spending bill to wind its way through Congress in twenty years. A decade ago, Ronald Reagan vetoed a Democratic highway bill that was more defensible than the current Shuster legislation. Even the Clinton Administration has stated that it "strongly opposes" the bill.

By latest count there are an estimated 1,100 pork-barrel "road" project requests that could make their way into the final bill. That's about three slabs of bacon for every congressman. The projects range from auto museums, to grants, to study "transportation problems in Appalachia," to a Greyhound-bus history center in Minnesota.

The highway bill is merely the worst example of the Republican drift from fiscal conservatism. When the Republicans seized control of the House in 1995, they offered up useless agencies and bureaus to the Budget Committee like lambs for the slaughter and ostentatiously eschewed pork. This year, members stampeded to get aboard Shuster's Transportation Committee like frenzied 14-year-olds rushing the stage at a Spice Girls concert. At the start of the session last year the committee was expanded to 73 slots -- the largest spending panel in congressional history. One member of the committee, insisting on anonymity (members are terrified of reprisals from Shuster) conceded, "When it comes to transportation funding, we just can't seem to control ourselves."

What is especially galling is that the budget-deal caps are already exceedingly generous. By the end of this, the first year of the deal, federal domestic outlays will have risen by $80 billion, or roughly two to three times the inflation rate. In 1999 the budget is scheduled to rise by another $75 billion. But for Republicans in an election year that's just not enough.

Meanwhile, back at the White House, the Clinton Administration of course has its own elaborate schemes for busting the budget caps. At least $150 billion of new spending over five years is envisioned in the bloated Clinton budget -- for Medicare expansion, baby-sitting subsidies, the hiring of more unionized teachers, IMF bailouts, welfare for immigrants, and other red meat for left-wing constituencies.

Republicans surely won't fend off this spending onslaught if they start the budget season by surrendering the moral high ground. The dispute between the two parties is no longer over how much to spend, but over whose priorities govern. Clinton Democrats want to fund populist middle-class social programs, whereas Republicans want to bust the bank to pour concrete. The likely compromise come October: they both get what they want.

If Congress blows a hole through the budget caps, warns sophomore Republican David McIntosh, "voters will reject Republicans in 1998 the same way they rejected big-government Democrats in 1994." Gingrich doesn't see it that way. His strategy for 1998 is to preserve and protect the Republican majority in Congress by piping billions of tax dollars into congressional districts across America just in time for the elections. Maybe that tax, spend, and elect game plan will work for Republicans just as brilliantly as it did for Democrats for nearly half a century.