Tension with Republicans ties up Bush's legislation
By Judy Keen, William M. Welch and Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — President Bush's relationship with Republicans in Congress is showing signs of strain at the very moment he needs them most.
It's a problem that forced Bush to reduce his demand for new tax cuts from $726 billion over a decade to $550 billion. If the Senate has its way, he'll get little more than $350 billion in net tax cuts — a repudiation for a popular commander in chief who just won a war and whose party controls both houses of Congress.
Some Republican members of Congress and their aides say the president is responsible for his waning clout, though most say it only anonymously. They grouse that he takes their votes for granted. They grumble that he's dismissive of ideas that don't originate at the White House. They complain that his tax cuts are too large to be politically palatable in a bad economy. Some say his agenda is in jeopardy because he has overreached.
"The president is having more trouble than he should" getting his priorities through Congress, says Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., the former majority leader.
"Some of my colleagues are carping" about the administration's reluctance to consult with Congress, Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, says.
No president gets everything he wants from Congress. But a few months ago, Bush seemed poised for success. He worked to help Republicans regain control of the Senate in November and expand their slim majority in the House of Representatives. He raised a record $141 million for Republicans, handpicked challengers in key races and campaigned extensively for them, hitting 15 states in the final five days before Election Day. His efforts helped make history. The last time the Republicans held outright control of the Senate, House of Representatives and presidency was in 1954.
In the first half of 2001, the two parties briefly shared control of the 50-50 Senate. The Republicans' ascendancy after that made some Washington insiders predict the president's agenda would be swept into law. Many of Bush's advisers thought it would be.
Yet no action is imminent on his most ambitious priorities, such as allowing investment of Social Security taxes in the stock market, modernizing the military, and giving religious groups a chance to compete for federal funds to run social programs.
Why Bush is stymied
Why can't the president get what he wants?
White House style: Some Republican leaders in Congress complain that Bush doesn't seek their advice often enough. Senate moderates are frustrated that he sometimes doesn't seem willing to negotiate. Some Republicans say the president is disdainful of their co-equal branch of government.
Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., says the administration refused to let him and other members of Congress enter Iraq during the spring recess, citing security concerns. "Hello? You let the press go in? You let (aid groups) go in? But not Congress?" he says. "They should be encouraging us to go, to be major players. (Instead), they are trying to restrict and filter what members do in Iraq."
The administration "has the most executive-centered view of government of any recent president," says Thomas Mann, an expert on governing at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "It believes that the president leads and the Congress follows — that Republican members of Congress are there at his beck and call. That's not the way the constitutional system was designed."
House-Senate differences: The House hierarchy is more conservative than Senate leaders and more in tune with Bush's philosophy. As a result, some initiatives that pass the House have no prayer in the Senate, such as limiting medical malpractice awards, opening Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling and banning flag burning.
House leaders are annoyed by the Senate's actions. "Some members of the Senate think it helps them to oppose the president," says John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. "The House delivers, and the Senate has trouble delivering."
Minuscule margins: In the House, there are 229 Republicans, 205 Democrats and one independent; the loss of 12 GOP votes jeopardizes Bush's agenda. In the Senate, where it takes 60 votes to pass almost anything controversial, there are 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats and an independent.
Political revenge: Democrats are more united as a minority in the Senate than they were when they ran it. Those who might be inclined to cut a deal with Bush for a big tax-cut plan, such as Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, took a lesson from last year's campaign. She had voted for the president's 2001 tax cuts, but he still campaigned aggressively against her.
"In the end, he's a gambler," says veteran Republican lobbyist Tom Korologos. "He gambled and beat the Democrats at their own game in winning seats in the off-year elections. So is he to take some blame? Of course he is. ... He's beaten them at their own game."
Economic fallout: The economy's poor performance during Bush's tenure has emboldened Democrats. Unable to challenge him on national security after the victory in Iraq, Democrats say they believe that rising joblessness, Wall Street declines and deflated consumer confidence will weaken him and help their party's candidates. Many members of Congress also are more worried about growing federal budget deficits than the White House.
Election tension: As the 2004 campaign nears, lawmakers are weighing how their votes will affect their own re-election chances. They are under more pressure than Bush is to keep their constituents happy. When the president didn't want to include a bailout for struggling airlines in a supplemental spending bill, for instance, Republicans put the money in the legislation anyway.
Top-down management style
Several Republican lawmakers and top aides use the same word to describe their sense of the administration's attitude toward Congress: arrogance.
There's lingering irritation among members of Congress over Bush's refusal to tell them until the last minute how much money he wanted for the Iraq war. There are broader complaints about his administration's penchant for secrecy, his reluctance to invest much time lobbying and socializing with them and his pattern of sending vague principles to Capitol Hill instead of detailed legislation.
There's still some resentment over the White House's role in engineering Lott's ouster as majority leader last year after he made remarks suggesting sympathy for Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign in 1948 — and replacing him with Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn.
Senate moderates are frustrated that Bush sometimes doesn't seem willing to negotiate. At a news conference March 6, he described lawmakers as "the spenders" — a slight that didn't go over well with some Republicans.
White House officials "don't feel they need to" always share their strategies with Congress, says an aide to a top Senate Republican. Hastert had to publicly signal his discomfort over the president's plan for prescription drug benefits earlier this year — a sign that he felt he was not adequately consulted.
The view among some of the longest-serving Republicans in the Senate, says a Republican lobbyist, is that Bush and his staff "are not good listeners." Some members of Congress believe that David Hobbs, Bush's chief lobbyist, doesn't command the same respect on the Hill as his predecessor, Nick Calio.
Bush's collaboration with Democrats also has waned. A House Republican leadership aide notes that "half" the Senate is running for president, and that "the silly season" of presidential elections has begun at a record early time.
In his first weeks in office, Bush met with more than 100 Democratic lawmakers. He invited Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to the White House theater for a private showing of Thirteen Days, a movie about John and Robert Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Kennedy became Bush's chief ally in the passage of landmark education reforms. There haven't been gatherings of that sort at the White House recently.
Bush just doesn't have time, says a senior administration official: "He's in the middle of conducting a war. ... Sometimes members of Congress feel like they should get all the attention in the world."
'Take-no-prisoners approach'
Some Republicans feel neglected, and others feel bullied. White House officials, they say, often are unwilling to temper their initiatives, even in the face of political realities. Korologos says the president's "take-no-prisoners approach" to Congress has alienated some members.
Voinovich got a dose of that tactic when the president went to Ohio last month to urge the state's residents to support at least $550 billion in tax cuts over a decade. Voinovich, who wants no more than $350 billion in cuts, hasn't changed his position.
Tensions between the president and Republicans in Congress burst into public view last month in the intramural scuffle over his proposal for $726 billion in new tax cuts. Frist, the new Senate majority leader, infuriated House leaders and the White House when he signed off on a secret deal limiting the size of the tax cuts to $350 billion over 10 years. House leaders thought they had a deal for $550 billion. Frist was reprimanded by White House officials and apologized to Hastert.
But the Republican leader's deal reflected the reality he and Bush face in the Senate: They don't have enough votes to pass a tax-cut plan as big as Bush wants. Nevertheless, some members of Congress say Frist, in his first year as majority leader, didn't work hard enough to win support for the president's original plan.
Frist rejects the notion that the president is stymied. "This is the process. In a closely divided United States Senate, it's a challenging prospect. But we're making progress," he says.
Bush, says White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, "is very satisfied this early in the year with the amount of work Congress has gotten done."
Hastert spokesman Feehery sent Washington reporters a memo Friday that said the president's domestic agenda "is steaming full speed ahead in the Congress, and anyone who thinks differently has lost their marbles."
What's at stake
Bush will declare victory no matter what the final amount of the tax cuts are. But passage of a package that falls short of what he sought could be just the beginning of a string of disappointments. Adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare, capping medical liability awards and expanding domestic drilling for oil all seem improbable this year.
If his agenda languishes, he may face a bigger problem: His domestic achievements could sound like old news in next year's presidential campaign. His most dramatic accomplishments — a 10-year, $1.35 trillion package of tax cuts and reforms in public education — were passed in his first year in office.
Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, says any difficulty Bush is having is due to his bold agenda. "The president is being rather aggressive in terms of what he thinks we need to do on the domestic front," says Portman, chief White House lobbyist for Bush's father when he was president. "Just as he did with Afghanistan and Iraq, he's taking a risk with the domestic agenda."
Bush's advisers say he sees no reason to temper his ambitions to suit what he views as Congress' occasional timidity. He believes he must reach for grand accomplishments, such as reforms in Medicare and Social Security. He believes all Republicans share his successes and should be eager to follow his lead. "The White House is eager to get things done and has a very big agenda," Shays says. "Most people would suggest, 'Back off a bit. Do a few things.' But I don't think this White House thinks it can back off."
The election is 18 months away, but Bush doesn't have much time. Congress will be in session for just 15 weeks from now until Oct. 3, when it's scheduled to go home for the year. Then it will be 2004 — a presidential election year, when Congress rarely achieves much.
"If he's impatient," says a Republican strategist who advises the White House, "it's because he knows what's at stake: his political future and theirs."
Contributing: Kathy Kiely |
