Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 6, 1995 TAG: 9504060050
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Our politics now divides very much along lines of class, race, religion, even sexual and intellectual orientation. One result is higher levels of vituperation that may spell trouble down the road.
President Clinton's campaign and first year in office came close to open class warfare. That his mandate was endorsed by only 43 percent of the voters - and even that withdrawn after less than two years - testifies to the country's fear of following Democrats further down the big-government road.
But Republicans have an equally hard time translating public frustration with welfare-state politics into a coherent program of change. Where the GOP Contract emphasized institutional change, it has enjoyed some success. For example, the House began with a bagful of real reforms in the way it does business.
The House also promptly passed measures subjecting Congress to the same labor laws imposed on other employers, giving the president a line-item veto on money bills, curbing federal mandates on states and localities, and requiring a balanced budget by 2002 if 38 states ratified the constitutional amendment. The first three are now law, embraced by Clinton; the last failed in the Senate by a single vote.
GOP leaders in the House had far less success in pushing a constitutional amendment limiting service in either house to 12 years. Term limits won a majority, 227 to 204, but needed 288 votes to pass constitutional muster.
Votes in the Virginia delegation have fallen into a predictable pattern. Republicans Robert Goodlatte, Thomas Bliley, Frank Wolf and Thomas Davis have generally gone down the line with the Contract, with Herbert Bateman occasionally dissenting. Democrats Owen Pickett, Robert Scott, James Moran and Rick Boucher have been almost equally solid against it while Norman Sisisky and L.F. Payne went back and forth.
On the compromise balanced-budget amendment that would have required the support of three-fifths of the members to run a deficit but only a simple majority to raise taxes, only Pickett, Scott and Boucher voted no. But all Virginia Democrats except Payne voted against the line-item veto. The Democrats united against term limits, joined by Bateman and Bliley.
While many good ideas are floating on this sea of rhetoric and Republicans deserve great credit for trying to do what they said they would, there's still less here than meets the eye. While there may be long-term benefit in making Congress live under the same regulations imposed on other employers, this may serve to make it less efficient and responsive. And who pays the cost of compliance? The law specifically provides that all penalties and legal fees will be paid from the treasury.
The unfunded-mandates bill also has a loophole a mile wide. While establishing the laudable goal of requiring Congress to specify how any mandate imposing more than $50 million in costs on state or local governments will be paid for, it allows that to be waived by a majority vote. While Democrats did everything they could to make this even weaker, on final passage, only Scott among Virginia legislators had the temerity to vote no.
Much hope has been placed in the line-item veto as a main device of moving toward a balanced budget. Let's hope it isn't misplaced. For all the talk of the good it would do, very few specific candidates for the line-item veto have ever been identified. While a president may not face the same pressures as an individual member of Congress, he's under many political constraints nonetheless.
Critics are on solid ground in saying the line-item veto deals a zealous president a strong hand, which may be the best argument in its favor. By checking the drift toward congressional government of the past 25 years, it may serve a more useful purpose than saving a few million here and there.
It is when you pass beyond structural reforms long overdue that Republicans are stymied. The uproar over federal funding of school lunches shows the dangerous and unforgiving waters they've entered. Never mind they actually proposed spending more than Clinton wanted over the next few years, it was the way they wanted to spend it that mattered. By transferring the program to 50 states in the form of block grants, the GOP would undercut the role of Congress as National Nanny, along with its network of allies servicing the vast apparatus of the welfare state, dependable Democrats all, or nearly so.
Just imagine a country where it's considered routine for half or more of all students in many school systems to sign up for free or reduced-price meals and you have described the United States only 30 years into that Great Society envisioned by Lyndon Johnson. Think of the great message those millions of children are getting, being told from birth they're entitled to free breakfast and lunch at school. Why not supper?
Oh, I know the argument: "It's the only decent meal many will get all day." Even if that dubious proposition is granted, what does it say about a nation in which so many millions of parents are believed so devoid of concern for their children as to be unable or unwilling to see they get a bowl of hot oatmeal in the morning?
A majority of voters is clearly searching for a return to values it believes made the country strong and prosperous in the first place. But resolving the question of how to do it will require something more threatening than the message a trembling dollar may already be trying to send.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB