Run-Down Republicans
Where Is the GOP's Agenda?
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, April 7, 2006; A19
Imagine that: Tom DeLay speaking truth to power.
"We don't have an agreed agenda," DeLay told a group of sympathetic reporters this week. "Breaking up our leadership has taken its toll."
Self-serving? Absolutely. DeLay is saying the Republicans have been in a mess ever since he stopped being majority leader. But with his comment on the GOP's agenda shortfall, The Hammer hit the nail on the head.
DeLay's fall is not the moment's most striking political event. His departure could have been foreseen at least a year ago, when he apologized for his "inartful" attacks on the federal judiciary after Terri Schiavo's death. Once DeLay was forced to say he was sorry about anything , you knew his days were numbered.
No, the most important development is the collapse of purpose in the Republican Party and the sense of exhaustion at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Other than the desperate scramble to make something go right in Iraq, our national government seems to have no energy, no coherence and no sense of direction.
This was brought home to me recently by a very smart Republican consultant whom I had queried about the splits in his party over immigration. He said something surprising -- and, given the Senate breakthrough announced yesterday, shrewd. However divided Republicans were over how to deal with illegal immigrants and border security, at least they were trying to solve a problem. His point was that there aren't many other solutions being proffered in Washington these days by either side.
President Bush inadvertently underscored the weakness of the Republican agenda when he flew to Bridgeport, Conn., on Wednesday to campaign for his health savings accounts, known as HSAs. Virtually no one other than the president -- oh, and perhaps a few ideologues and insurance companies -- sees HSAs as anything approaching a comprehensive solution to the nation's growing health-care problem.
Senate Republicans have already dropped HSAs from their budget, and Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the Finance Committee chairman, has been openly skeptical about doing anything on HSAs this year. The president was thus campaigning for a doomed idea in Connecticut when, just over the border in Massachusetts, a bipartisan majority in the legislature was passing a visionary plan requiring all residents to buy health insurance and providing subsidies for those who can't afford the full freight. The contrast between the policy energy that exists in many states and the intellectual torpor in Washington could not have been more stark.
Meanwhile, DeLay's former colleagues in the House were showing how years of incoherent budgeting lead to impasse. House Republicans are having a devilish time passing any budget, because conservatives think there should be much bigger cuts and moderates think way too many cuts in social service programs have been made already.
There is no magic here, nothing complicated. Big spending on war, defense and prescription drugs for the elderly, combined with big tax cuts, produces a fiscal squeeze. But Republicans are paralyzed because they can't deal with the core problems without walking away from their earlier policy choices. So they keep feuding.
The maddening aspect of our current stalemate is that it was entirely predictable. It took no great genius to see that cutting taxes in a time of war and other security threats would create large problems. The contradiction between the current majority's small-government rhetoric and heavy federal spending has been visible for years. For conservatives to be shocked at our big deficits suggests they were unwilling participants in government, forced to vote for one budget after another at gunpoint. Even The Hammer wasn't that tough.
The day after the 2004 elections, Tom DeLay was ebullient. "The Republican Party is a permanent majority for the future of this country," he declared. "We're going to be able to lead this country in the direction we've been dreaming of for years." Whatever DeLay's conservative Republican allies were dreaming of, the current dead end can't be where they hoped to arrive.
The collapse of conservatism is not primarily DeLay's fault. It's possible to live with contradictions and evasions for a long time -- but not forever. Conservatives got a longer lease on life than they deserved, partly because the war on terrorism obscured what was happening and partly because their opponents on the center-left lacked their own driving dream. The point of coming up with a new approach to governing is not to win some election or to satisfy querulous reporters asking, "What's your alternative?" It is to provide the energy that this crowd no longer has and to solve problems that the current majority is powerless to deal with. |
