Issues from 1995 bog Senate agenda

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 15, 1996 | by Michael Rust

Republicans hope to complete legislation before presidential paralysis sets in; Democrats think they've mastered minority guerrilla tactics.

The transformation of Capitol Hill from a fount of government largesse to the nerve center of American conservatism has been difficult for just about everyone. But as Ronald Reagan might have put it, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Look at the Senate, where a slow legislative pace just might get slower. It's going to get harder and harder through the remainder of this Congress," Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute tells Insight. The Senate opens the new year resolving questions left from 1995, a year that closed with both Senate and House leaders slogging their way through a budget morass while trading fire with the White House. What's more, all attempts to form a new agenda will be overwhelmed by the throes of the presidential campaign -- which is powerfully affecting the Senate GOP leadership.

"I don't think it has been a more liberal Senate thwarting the will of the conservative Housel" says Ornstein. "In part, it's just a body of 100 egos." The real contrast between the House and Senate in the 104th Congress has been the failure of the Senate to achieve anything like "the kind of party discipline that Newt Gingrich has achieved in historic fashion in the House," he adds.

But that sort of discipline hasn't existed since Reconstruction in the Senate, which for more than 200 years has served as a brake on the more rambunctious House. However, the failure to move in tandem with House Republicans has become a political problem for the Senate in 1996. A year from now, it should -- in theory, at least -- be simpler. Among the rules changes enacted by Senate Republicans in 1995 was a provision calling for a formal policy agenda presented by the Republican Conference at the beginning of each new session. That is scheduled to begin in January 1997, one year and one presidential election into the future.

In late December 1995, agendas for the future, even for the rapidly approaching new year, were far from the minds of senators and staffers with whom Insight spoke as they struggled to get through the fevered swamps of the federal budget. Toward the end of the second week of December, when a reporter asked a senior aide to Minority Leader Tom Daschle if the South Dakota Democrat could squeeze in an interview about next year's agenda between budget negotiations with Republicans and the White House, the aide laughed. Then, as the full force of the question hit her, she laughed some more.

"We're really not thinking about that right now," she finally wheezed; in fact the ongoing imbroglio about the federal budget has kept leaders on both sides of the aisle focused on the immediate goal of keeping the government functioning.

Throughout 1995, the Senate labored in the shadow of the House, where Gingrich -- named Time magazine's "Man of the Year" -- had become first a hero to conservatives and then ground zero for Democratic attacks. The House was where freshmen Republicans were the most fervent and veteran Democrats the most bitter. The Senate seemed to enter the national consciousness only when it appeared to be an impediment to the ongoing struggles of would-be Republican revolutionaries in the House. When the balanced-budget amendment lost by one vote; when GOP senators criticized the proposed tax cut; when Oregon's Bob Packwood resigned in disgrace -- only then did the Senate float into the public consciousness.

However, Senate Republicans don't see it this way. While wishing their counterparts in the House every success, they don't see enactment of every item of the Gingrich agenda as a make-or-break measure. "The contract was a marvelous and important rhetorical rallying device," a senior GOP leadership staffer tells Insight. "But, from the standpoint of history, the determinant of our success or failure will be what happens with the budget, because the budget involves the saving of Medicare, the reforming of welfare, the limiting of government, the provision of tax cuts." In fact, to put it bluntly, "the budget is the big enchilada" the senior staffer continues. "Everything else is, I think, a pale second to it."

The budget struggle continues just as the presidential campaign picks up steam. Certainly one thing that will mark the next few months in the Senate is that a lot of important senators want to be somewhere else. At the top of the list, of course, is Majority Leader Bob Dole, who is attempting to do what Lyndon Johnson, Robert Taft, Alben Barkley and a host of his other predecessors could not do -- move directly from the Senate leadership to the White House. Dole, Senate sources tell Insight, has decided to remain in his leadership position at least through the Republican convention in July, even if he has the nomination wrapped up by mid-April. This will allow him to keep a steady media presence as he fires away at the Clinton administration whenever necessary

However, this does not mean that leadership duties are likely to trump the ever-pressing demands of the GOP's front-running presidential candidate. In fact, Dole submitted a legislative schedule that called for no votes to be held between Christmas and the New Hampshire primary if a budget deal were struck in December. While the press of budgetary concerns may force alterations to that convenient timetable, the leadership will do all it can to avoid putting the majority leader under undue stress.