GOP victory prompts command performance - Republican victory in the 1994 elections - includes related article on effect of the election on the Democratic Party

Michael Rust

Republicans will control both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, but they would do well to heed President Clinton's setback as a cautionary tale.

Less than 48 hours after the extraordinary Nov. 8 midterm elections, veteran GOP consultant Ed Rollins told a Washington audience that he had never expected to see such an electoral upheaval in his lifetime. "Democrats in the White House better not underestimate what happened," he said, adding, "Republicans had better perform."

With the day-after defection of Alabama's Richard Shelby, the GOP will enjoy a 53-47 edge in the Senate next year. The change in the House will be even more overwhelming, where at least 54 seats will turn Republican. But the election has upended Washington's political culture from top to bottom. Republicans now will have a majority of congressional staff positions - and they will demonstrate their fiscal bonafides by eliminating some patronage positions currently held by Democrats. New congressional leaders are promising institutional reforms aimed at making Congress more responsive to voters.

And what the voters have demanded, say Republicans, is a return to Reagan-era themes such as cutting taxes on capital gains, passing a balanced budget amendment and slowing down defense cuts. Clinton appointees to the bench and the State Department will be subject to more critical scrutiny, and some of the president's achievements - such as last summers crime bill - may be overturned.

It's uncertain how the Democrats will respond. A number of moderate Democrats are leaving Congress, including Tennessee's Jim Cooper, who sponsored health care legislation to compete with the Clinton plan, and Oklahoma's Dave McCurdy, who has been influential on defense and intelligence issues. Remaining House Democrats are fewer in number and more liberal in outlook. The Congressional Black Caucus, "as far as it maintains itself as a very solid, liberal-to-progressive bloc, which is not really be found anywhere else in Congress or in the Democratic Party," might wield new power, notes Howard University political scientist Alvin Thornton.

On the other hand, some minority members "will be forced back into the roles they played when they first came into the Congress," says Thornton "They had no institutional authority and no reasonable expectation of get ting any in the near future, so they played a kind of educational role as opposed to a legislative role." This, he points out, is what Newt Gingrich, the next House speaker, did during the last several years. "He wasn't interested in getting anything passed - he was `educating,' if you will."

As GOP consultant Glenn Bolger explains, this leaves Clinton "between a rock and a hard place." When Republicans cut spending and propose tough crime legislation, the president will have to wield his veto pen,"even if it`s going to be politically unpopular for him to veto. He's going to be pulled by the left to veto it and pushed by middle America to go ahead and support it."

But if the public grows dissatisfied with the Republican agenda - or if they sense the GOP isn,t serious about reform - their patience will be short. At both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, politicians are looking over their shoulders@ at a critical electorate.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are thinking of 1996. Both Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, the new majority leader, and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, are laying the groundwork for presidential bids, and both will be jockeying for position in the 104th Congress. Newt Gingrich undoubtedly will work to place conservative allies in key committee positions in the House - even if it means sometimes edging out more senior Republicans.

At any rate, when the next Congress gress convenes in January, House Republicans have a ready-made agenda - the controversial "Contract With America" that GOP candidates promised would be enacted in the first 100 days. Democrats had derided the contract as a campaign miscalculation and a "contract on America." In light of Election Day, the GOP ploy appears to have become a mandate.

Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster and major force behind the contract who predicted a Republican sweep four weeks before the polls opened, warned the day after that "what happened yesterday will be completely irrelevant if Republicans don't follow through on the contract." The House's first-day agenda certainly will include populist-leaning reform legislation that would hold Congress to the same federal laws that apply to the rest of the country, cut congressional staffing levels deeply and reduce the number of committees and subcommittees. "`Congress - the way it ought to be' - that could have been our slogan, and now its something we've got to deliver," says Bolger.

Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, points out that congressional reform drew bipartisan support during the last session but was stymied by Democratic leadership. "The Joint Committee on Reorganization had what we thought were a lot of good ideas, but they really couldn't even get those to the floor," he says. "You did have bipartisan support, but you had a leadership that said no." If Gingrich and Dole are serious, reforms should sail through this time.

While reform is first on the agenda, Gingrich and the Republicans have pledged to bring several major bills to the floor for a vote, including two highly controversial constitutional amendments - one to balance the budget and another to impose term limits on lawmakers. Other proposals on the agenda include a capital-gains tax cut, a $500-per-child tax credit - with accompanying spending cuts to restrain the deficit - welfare reform, a crime bill and a line-item veto. In fact, at his postelection press conference, Clinton requested enactment of the line-item veto, which Democratic lawmakers had denied him.)

The call for term limits probably has some Republicans gulping hard. Fortunately, the contract calls for the to debate and vote on term limits, no necessarily to pass them. (A simple floor vote on the issue would be regarded as a major step toward reform.) However, some obvious problem remain. The average congressional tenure of a GOP House chairman is 19 years, according to Cleta Deatherage Mitchell, director of the Term Limits Legal Institute. Of 22 would-be committee chairs, only six are younger than age 60. The contract calls for either six- or 12-year limits on terms, and some Republicans may try to finesse the issue. "So what if you have a situation where you have 100 votes for six years and 100 votes for 12 years? asks Mitchell. "It doesn't pass and they all go back and say, `Gee, we voted for it." But despite the tension between the competing principles of senioriry and rotation in office, the GOP must stand by its commitment, she concludes. "While this is one of the least popular parts of the contract in Washington, it is one of the most popular parts of the contract in America."

One who will not resort to subterfuge is Henry Hyde, the Illinois representative who may chair the House Judiciary Committee. In a spirit of bipartisanship that made even conciliatory Republicans uncomfortable, Hyde joined outgoing Speaker Tom Foley in a challenge to term limits in Washington state. Now that a vote on the issue virtually is assured, "Henry's going to oppose it," says his press secretary, Sam Stratman. "He appreciates the fact that there will be debate on it. That is completely consistent with the contract." Meanwhile, the number of states voting for congressional term limits has reached 22.

Once the initial contract obligations are met, Republicans see several options. With Ohio Rep. John Kasich chairing the Budget Committee, Clinton could face the prospect of fighting congressionally sanctioned spending cuts. "This is going to be John Kasich's budget," says Schatz, noting that the House budget resolution doesn't require a presidential signature. Similarly, the new Ways and Means chairman, man, Bill Archer of Texas, likely will renew calls for reductions in the tax on capital gains - profits from the sale of property or stocks - which would have special resonance for Republicans. George Bush desperately wanted to cut the capital-gains tax as a recession-fighting measure, but the Senate Democratic leadership killed the effort in the early 1990s.

Unlike their House counterparts, Senate Republicans ran on a less specific - or binding - platform. At a news conference on the day after the election, Dole said that a balanced-budget amendment, welfare reform, term limits and ethics reform would be Republican priorities and agreed with House Republicans that measures affecting Congress - such as ethics and term limits - should take precedence. Gramm agreed that a balanced-budget amendment would be a priority and targeted Clinton's crime bill for repeal. "We passed a $30 billion social program and called it a crime bill," he said.

It's uncertain how President Clinton will respond to this agenda. Clinton ton advisers who wistfully remember a time when the president was known as a New Democrat wish he would focus on welfare reform. If they prevail, Clinton could find Republican allies. Bolger, who did polling for one-third of the incoming Republican freshmen, says that his candidates "ran partly on welfare reform, and they're going to come to Washington expecting to do something about it."

To make matters worse for the president, the new majority in Congress will be more likely to probe the murky depths of Whitewater. Republicans are expected to renew their call for comprehensive hearings into Clinton's ties to a failed Arkansas savings and loan and other financial dealings. They may appoint a select committee to investigate the affair, according to Martin Gross, author of The Great Whitewater Fiasco. Whitewater, he says, is "a story of 50 to 100 pieces of unethical behavior and that won't come out without the hearings, and the hearings won't come out without a Republican Congress - in either house." However, if either house went Republican, Gross predicted before the election, "there will be extensive Whitewater hearings, and my guess is that the president will resign from office."

On the other hand, Clinton, whose political skills few underestimate, could turn the Republican landslide into an opportunity, depicting himself as a centrist opposed by left-leaning Democrats and conservative Republicans cans alike. In a political world marked by weakening partisan loyalties, this wouldn't be a bad marketing strategy.

In the meantime, leadership decisions must be made. Pennsylvania Rep. Joseph McDade was the senior Republican in line to chair the powerful Appropriations Committee, which has jurisdiction over hundreds of billions of dollars. McDade is a skilled legislator and is popular with constituents. Unfortunately, he also is under federal indictment on racketeering and conspiracy charges, and Gingrich moved after the election to block McDade from the chairmanship. On the other side of the Capitol, 91-year-old Strom Thurmond of South Carolina is the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, but some believe that Thurmond - who ran for president in 1948 as a "Dixiecrat" candidate - will pass on the chairmanship because of his age. If that is the case, Virginia's John Warner would inherit the gavel.

And that way, some Republicans fear, lies madness. One of the few disappointments during the election was GOP candidate Oliver North's failure to unseat Sen. Charles Robb in Virginia. Accusatory Republicans point at Warner, who endorsed an independent rather than support North. During an election-night visit to the headquarters of Tom Davis - a moderate congressional candidate who defeated freshman Democrat Leslie Byrne of Virginia's 11th district - Warner was booed by the party faithful.

"There's a real anger level there, and it's another sign of the tension in the Republican Party," says Gary Bauer, a onetime Reagan aide who heads the conservative Family Research Council. Virginia wasn't the only site of dysfunctionalism within the GOP family. In addition to the highly publicized defections of GOP mayors Rudolph Giuliani in New York and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Teresa Heinz, the widow of Sen. John Heinz, came out against Republican candidate Rick Santorum in the last days of the campaign. "These guys have to decide whether they want to be Republicans or not," says Bauer.

Such riffs foreshadow future conflicts. The much-maligned religious right had a good election, with virtually all of their endorsed candidates for the House winning - including Idaho's Helen Chenoweth and Washington's Linda Smith, who suffered Democratic attacks for their Christian Coalition connections. Religious conservatives seem to have entered the mainstream, and the pro-life movement might quietly abandon dreams of banning legal abortion. However, they certainly will continue to push for restrictions whenever possible. Bauer notes that the new Congress will include 40 new opponents of abortion in the House - including seven women - and at least seven new pro-life senators.

If Republicans try to abandon social issues, they will pay a price. "I really believe that if the Republicans drop these issues or try to shove them aside, they will face a social-issues Ross Perot in '96," says Bauer, who fears that his segment of the GOP coalition may get the brush-off from Republican leaders in Congress. "I'm going to remain skeptical about them. There are some good guys there - Dick Armey is fantastic - but I've been in town for a long time and been in these wars a long time, and I'm not going to accept a pat on the head." Bauer wants votes on social issues, and "if we don't get them, I'm going to publicly talk about it. I think we can cause a lot of trouble if that part of the coalition is not taken care of."

If the Republicans can unite, the opportunity to alter the political landscape is theirs. Terrence Jeffrey, executive director of American Cause, says that "the philosophical media line in both houses of Congress moved to the right. This could be the beginning of the real Middle American Revolution."

If they fail, they will inject a shot of adrenaline in a floundering presidency. The Democratic electoral debacle may have been "the best thing to have happened for Bill Clinton," says Howard University's Thornton, because it gives him a chance to define his presidency." Clinton could find that he enjoys life more when he has something to run against - a Congress with power and responsibility. He can help stymie congressional Republicans through the veto and "other kinds of stalling tactics.... So he's able to define them as a loser, and on that backdrop he can make his case for another presidential run," says Thornton. "Its just going to be a very interesting two years."

Will Democrats Swin With the Tide?

Shell-shocked Democrats, sorting through the ruins of their midterm-election defeat, are trying to figure out how they can rebuild their shattered party by 1996.

The Democratic Party saw its worst nightmare come true Nov. 8 The GOP will control all of the committees of Congress, their staffs, the legislative process and the appropriations of government, which is the stuff of political power. The Republican Party will have ultimate say about President Clinton's remaining agenda, his nominees and, to a large degree, his political future.

"Nothing will pass unless it gets our approval," a House GOP legislative strategist said recently. "That's the political reality the Democrats now face, and presidents are measured by what they can get through Congress."

The GOP's congressional leaders, Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who will become House speaker, and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, the new Senate majority leader, are experienced political tacticians who know how to use the levers of legislative power to benefit their party.

Making matters even more difficult for Clinton and his party are the deep divisions between its dominant liberal wing - which opposes any compromise with Republicans - and its "centrist" faction - which believes the Democrats cannot survive politically unless the party moves into the political mainstream.

Even as Clinton sent out signals of compromise and cooperation with the Republicans, saying he "got the message" voters sent during the election, Democrats were bickering among themselves. "l don't think there is any choice which direction the party has to go," says Democratic campaign consultant George Burge. "It has to go toward the center or we will suffer additional losses in 1996. We are now looked at as a left-wing, high-tax, big-spending, big-government party. We've got to marshall our troops to work with the Republicans, or we'll get blitzed."

Indeed, the president who spent much of the campaign denouncing the GOP's "Contract With America" legislative platform told reporters after the election that "there are some things in that contract that I like." He singled out its proposals for a line-item veto, middle-class tax cuts and cutting federal spending and welfare reform. With his Democratic majority in Congress destroyed and his party's morale in a slump, the president said he welcomed "bipartisan cooperation."

But that message fell with a thud among liberal Democrats, who think that any cooperation with the Republicans would be the kiss of death for their party. "If Bill Clinton compromises with the Republicans it would be a disastrous mistake," says Amy Isaacs, national director of Americans for Democratic Action. "He's got a choice of whether he's going to be Harry Truman and fight the Republican agenda or be Bill Clinton and compromise with it."

House Republicans were ridiculed by the Democrats and the media elite when they embraced the contract. But it gave their candidates a common cause around which to rally and answered the most common question from the voters: What are you for?

Centrists such as A1 From, president dent of the Democratic Leadership Council once chaired by Clinton, believe that Democrats will not be able to regain their strength unless they put together an agenda of their own "to capture the political center." That means Democrats must embrace many of the proposals contained in the GOP contract, such as the balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. "I think the contract is pretty close to where mainstream voters are," he says.

COPYRIGHT 1994 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group