POTOMAC WATCH
The Republican Moment
Will the GOP have the courage, at last, to change the face of government?
BY PAUL A. GIGOT
Thursday, January 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
When President George W. Bush looks down across the mall today to deliver his second inaugural address, he will survey a Republican landscape. Not since 1928 has a president continued GOP control of the White House into a new term along with a re-elected Republican House and Senate. So it is fair to say that we are about to find out if the GOP really is a governing party.
I don't mean "governing" in the sense of merely making the Beltway trains run on time and surviving as a majority. The Republican test going forward, and one voters should hold them to, is whether the party can now put its permanent stamp on Washington in a way that is consistent with its professed conservative philosophy. More than just a challenge for Mr. Bush, the next two years will tell us if this GOP majority is made to last or will be as evanescent as the Whigs.
Whatever one thinks of its policies, the Democratic Party surely made a difference during its 20th-century heyday. Set aside its last, corrupted years in power. When liberalism was ascendant, from the 1930s through the 1970s, Democrats permanently altered the face of government.
They ended poverty for the elderly with cross-generational entitlement programs, broke Jim Crow's hold in the South with civil-rights laws, built the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that bedevil American business every day, turned our courts into quasi-legislative bodies, and planted the seeds of government-run health care that continue to grow today. As the party of government, they built institutions and processes that have consistently expanded its scope.
What, in the decade since they've retaken the House, have Republicans done that is consequential in the same way? If the GOP majorities vanished tomorrow, what couldn't Democrats easily repeal? I've asked the latter question of numerous Republicans in recent days, and the only confident answer I get is "welfare reform." By requiring in 1996 that the poor enter the world of work, Republicans stopped the development of a permanent American underclass. Yet despite that historic success, it is striking that they still haven't had the nerve or clout to pass an extension of even that reform through the Senate.
As for other lasting achievements, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich mentions health-savings accounts as the germ of free-market health care. He may turn out to be right, but the price of passing HSAs was $7 trillion or so in new Medicare liabilities. The many GOP tax cuts have also been valuable, and have forced the government to live with less money, but those too could be repealed. I can't think of anything else.
In fact, it is depressing to consider how much of what Republicans wanted to do under a Democratic president in the '90s they have abandoned now that they control both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. The regulatory reform requiring "cost-benefit" analysis that came within a vote of passing the Senate in 1995 has never returned. The excellent Medicaid reform vetoed by Bill Clinton has also gone nowhere, despite pleas from many governors to revive it. The Freedom to Farm Act was gutted.
Even the congressional budget process that Democrats designed to make spending easier remains entirely unchanged. Fourteen years ago, Congressman Chris Cox was able to win upward of 180 votes for such budget changes; last year he got 88, and he had to buck the rest of the GOP leadership to get even those.
Some of this can be blamed, first, on having a Democrat in the White House, and later having only small majorities on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate. But not anymore. After November's victory, Republicans don't have any more excuses.
The good news is that Republicans in Congress do have a new, and rare, opportunity. In Mr. Bush, they have a president willing to use his bully pulpit to promote large and long-term reforms, notably on Social Security, health care, liability law, taxes and the judiciary. Doing even two or three of these would be a major achievement.
Mr. Bush is making Social Security his first priority, and rightly so. It is in some ways the politically most difficult, but it is also the intellectually clearest. Private Social Security accounts aren't a radical idea and have been tried with success other places in the world. They have great appeal to young people, who correctly see that Social Security won't otherwise be there for them, yet they don't threaten the benefits of older Americans. The transition costs have to be accounted for, but this is mainly a question of budget math and political judgment.
The reform is well worth any political risk because, among other things, it would rewrite the social compact across generations. Young people would be able to save for their own retirement, not consign 12.4% of their paycheck to transfer payments. The reform would instantly reduce the federal government's long-term liabilities, and above all it would make every American from the first day of work a member of the investor class. Over time this will reduce the demand for government, which ought to be a major Republican goal.
So it is distressing to see so many Republicans on Capitol Hill running for cover even before the debate begins. Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley negotiate with themselves over a tax increase before they have a single Democratic commitment. Bill Thomas, the Ways and Means Chairman, this week helpfully suggested that Mr. Bush's proposal was a "dead horse," floating instead his own gargantuan tax-reform proposal that is even less likely to pass. Every important reform has its Perils-of-Pauline moments, but this early GOP disarray will only make success harder by letting fence-sitting Democrats believe they can safely oppose the idea.
A second big test will be judges, which is again largely a matter of political unity and determination. The Democratic filibuster of Mr. Bush's appellate-court nominees is both unprecedented (see the 2002 Congressional Research Service report by Richard Beth) and anti-constitutional because it denies them an up-or-down "advice and consent" Senate vote. The issue was litigated in the recent election, notably with the defeat of obstructionist-in-chief Tom Daschle. And Republicans have a ready procedural remedy at their disposal to force a simple majority vote.
Yet even with a 55-seat majority, some Republicans don't want to take this clearly reasonable step. Presidential wannabes John McCain and Chuck Hagel are two of the holdouts, suggesting how little they understand the Republican coalition. The confirmation of conservative judges is the highest priority of millions of those who voted last November. If Democrats are again able to stymie the nomination of a Janice Brown or Miguel Estrada to the appellate bench, much less to the Supreme Court, those voters will be seriously disillusioned.
The other problem the GOP should tackle head-on, though it still seems reluctant to do so, is health care. Tort and tax reform are worth fighting for, but both will be harder than most Republicans want to admit. The legal reforms that are now being pushed in the Senate (especially on asbestos) have been so watered down that they may not be worth the political effort. On tax reform, the GOP remains divided on how to proceed and will need some months to sort through the options.
Progress on health care is achievable, on the other hand, and would address a problem that every American confronts personally. Medicare and Medicaid costs are rising so rapidly that, as Mr. Gingrich observes, without reform they will soon make it impossible to balance either state or federal budgets without tax increases. Meanwhile, businesses are passing on to their employees more of the cost of their health insurance--which is entirely rational but makes the issue certain to grow in importance as Hillary Rodham Clinton plots her White House run.
The Republican answer should be to promote steps, even if incremental, to revive the individual market for health care. The White House proposal to allow health-insurance sales over the Internet, thus superseding costly state mandates, would be a major improvement. So would changes to expand HSAs and Mr. Cox's idea to make all health-care expenses tax-deductible. All of these would expand the private market for health insurance, as well as reduce its cost and the number of the uninsured. These reforms would also begin to reverse what has long seemed to be the inexorable drift toward ever-more government control.
Republicans in Congress like to complain about this White House's negotiating style, and of course they will want to put their own stamp on legislation. But they should also recognize how fortunate they are to have a president willing to expend some of his own prestige to persuade the public and make their reform votes easier.
If they think they can walk away from his agenda in the name of their own incumbent self-preservation, they might want to recall why they were able to win the majority back in 1994. Democrats ran the entire government then, but liberals told the upstart president from Arkansas that the welfare reform he'd run on was a non-starter. The campaign reform they'd all promised for years? Also no way. Their (much larger) majority proceeded to split apart over guns, health care and taxes. It could happen to Republicans too.
Mr. Gigot is the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal.
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