GOP Spending Cuts and Seasonal Follies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 22, 1999 | by Jennifer G. Hickey

The Republicans score with a big-time defense bill signed by President Clinton, while presidential candidates continue their diversionary sideshow. Big story: the spending cuts.

This was the week that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan criticized the United States for not allowing Iraq to import 100,000 musical doorbells and then tossed out the first pitch for Game 3 of the World Series; Bill Clinton professed straight-faced "that the person I love the most in the world" is someone other than himself; and the eggs of struggling models were being marketed on the Internet to people desiring to produce beautiful children.

The week, however, began on a melancholy note with news of the death of retiring Rhode Island Republican Sen. John Chafee. For much of Monday's Senate session the familiar acrimony was set aside as member after member rose to honor one of the body's most independent members. As Republican and Democrat, ally and adversary, stepped to the lectern to express their sorrow, the flowers on Chafee's desk reminded everyone that the genial four-term senator was gone.

But the sobriety elicited by the death of a fellow senator could not last forever and the whiskey rhetoric soon flowed once more. After having demonstrated the conviction and political aptitude to defeat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and campaign-finance legislation, the GOP leadership struck again by proposing a 1.4 percent across-the-board cut in discretionary spending (exempting entitlements such as Medicaid and Medicare).

"We are only asking government agencies to weed out waste, not cut salaries or jobs," declared House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. With new spending increases dancing in his head, Clinton countered not with policy but politics. Momentarily refraining from biting his lower lip, he declared of the GOP plan, "I will not allow Congress to raise its own pay [while making] devastating across-the-board cuts in everything from education to child nutrition to the FBI." The FBI? Nah.

Republican Rep. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania challenged the minority to vote up or down on raising taxes to foot increased spending sought by the president. This sense of the Congress resolution passed 371-48 even as Democrats screamed about Republicans playing politics. It was, of course, tactical and nonbinding, but it was on the record now.

In the end the leadership scaled back spending cuts to 1 percent across the board; but that was not "caring" enough for Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri. Finding it easier to shovel waste than to cut it, Gephardt damned the majority for slashing "our commitment to the needs of our most vulnerable children ... [by] trying to pull out the rug from under them with reckless cuts that ask them to sacrifice the most." The man does have a gift for mixing metaphors.

Then, switching their rhetoric from Sesame Street to GI Joe, the congressional Democrats attacked the $268 billion defense-appropriations bill signed by Clinton on Monday. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of North Dakota bemoaned a 1 percent reduction in defense spending as a "disaster" despite the fact that, even with the cut, the GOP defense budget was $1.8 billion higher than Clinton's request.

Congressional antics moved from the completely sublime to the utterly ridiculous when several Democratic representatives, led by California's Lynn Woolsey, interrupted a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the future of U.S.-China relations to express outrage that Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina had refused to meet with them to discuss a U.N. treaty favored by radical feminists. Standing in the back of the room with their placards, they called on Helms to hold hearings on me U.N. Convention to Eliminate All Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW, which has languished in the Senate since Jimmy Carter sent it there in 1979. When the women resisted his encouragement that they behave like ladies, Helms had the demonstrators escorted from the room by the U.S. Capitol Police. Remember William Weld, girls?

Meanwhile, with the decision handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit upholding bans in Illinois and Wisconsin on the procedure known as partial-birth abortion, and Clinton's likely veto of the bill approved by the Congress last week to criminalize the procedure, the issue seems headed to the Supreme Court. With the next president likely to fill three Supreme Court vacancies, the race for the White House moved from a fast pace to a sprint.

To no one's surprise, former commentator and perennial candidate Pat Buchanan made his switch from the GOP to the Reform Party, a move greeted with reaction as mixed as Roger Clemens' leap from the Boston Red Sox to the World Champion New York Yankees. And even Yankee owner George Steinbrenner probably couldn't build a winner with sideshow personalities as weird as those at the top of the Reform Party. Buchanan immediately was joined by real-estate mogul, gambler, womanizer and egotist Donald Trump.