Now there’s a decent chance that one or both houses of Congress could change hands in the Nov. 8 midterm elections. That would mean House Gadfly Newt Gingrich becomes House Speaker Newt Gingrich, ready to enforce the flashy “Contract with America” that 300 GOP lawmakers and candidates signed last week. It would mean that Alfonse D’Amato, Orrin Hatch, Strom Thurmond, Bob Packwood and possibly even Jesse Helms would become chairmen of key Senate committees. This is Washington’s idea of an earthquake.
The only question is how big on the Richter scale. To end their 40 years in the minority, House Republicans must pick up 40 new seats. That would be some quake. Since World War II, the average number of House seats lost in midterm elections by the party in the White House is 26. But 1994 is not an average year. The combination of 52 open seats, a sour anti-incumbent mood, new gerrymandered GOP districts in the South and widespread dislike of Bill Clinton could make this a landmark midterm election, like 1946 or 1974. According to Earl Black of Rice University, if the GOP wins slightly more than half of the House races now rated as tossups, they would take control.
Over on the Senate side, the magic number for the GOP is seven (six if you assume that Alabama conservative Richard Shelby could be induced to switch parties). The postwar average shift in midterm elections is four. Charles Cook, who runs the influential Cook Political Report newsletter, estimates a 15 to 20 percent chance of a change of power in the House and a 40 percent chance in the Senate, where four Democratic incumbents are vulnerable and at least half of the nine open seats are leaning Republican. Other analysts believe that the GOP has peaked too soon and that the House losses will be kept in the 20-30 range, while the Senate will stay narrowly Democratic.
Even if Democrats do better than expected, Clinton will almost surely lose effective working control of the Congress. His margins on key votes in the last two years were so thin that the slightest Democratic erosion on Capitol Hill means he will have to move to the right to get anything accomplished. In the meantime, major gains are likely to embolden Republicans to try even harder to give him nothing.
Losing control outright has some advantages for the Democrats. It would allow them to regroup, clear out 40 years’ worth of clogged congressional arteries and show Gingrich and company how much tougher it is to govern than to criticize. But besides representing a stinging vote of no confidence, Republican control of Congress would consign Clinton to a 1996 presidential campaign devoted to breaking grid-lock–something that voters thought they had accomplished in 1992. To break it a second time, they might just throw the president out. Clinton is also not temperamentally suited to running against Congress, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He’d rather negotiate for a few more accomplishments than score rhetorical points.
But let’s say the big quake hits. What then? In the House, Gingrich and his allies have spent the last decade lobbing shells at Democrats and the institution of Congress. They specialize in crafting sharp–often vitriolic–attacks. But kneecapping doesn’t work when you’re in charge. And some of the ideas to which they are now commit-ted–like cutting congressional staff by one third–could look different when the staff belongs to them. “It might be better for their growth, enlightenment and maturity if they didn’t get it this time but came close and had to shadow-govern for two years,” says retiring Rep. Fred Grandy, an Iowa Republican.
The Gingrich “contract” suggests why the Republicans don’t seem ready. The idea is to show that the GOP can advance a positive agenda instead of just obstructing. Signing a contract is a good gimmick in a cynical time; it carries more weight than a mere promise. And some of the reforms–like a line-item veto to help presidents cut spending and a law making the losers in civil-court proceedings pay all legal fees–are long overdue. The problem is that the contract’s main idea has already been tried and discredited. House Republicans are now pledged to tax cuts, increased defense spending and a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. Sound familiar? “This was a dopey political move,” Grandy says. “We were holding the high ground on welfare, foreign policy, so why would we go back and shoosh down the Laffer Curve? This is like giving the Democrats a nuclear weapon.”
The Democrats agree, which is why they are a little less despondent this week. Their party line is that the Gingrich contract is “deja voodoo.” “Newt did us a huge favor,” says outgoing Democratic Party Chairman David Wilhelm. “He reminded people why they voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. They don’t want to go back to trickle-down economics, back to when ketchup was a vegetable.” In fact, the Democrats’ campaign theme, approved in a meeting last week with Clinton, is: “Don’t Go Back.”
So instead it’s back to that tired debate over the meaning of the 1980s. Most Republicans are perfectly happy to have the Democrats conjure Reaganomics. “If they want to run Clinton against Reagan again–fine, I’ll take that,” says Daniel Casse, of Project for the Republican Future, a GOP strategy group. As for the notion that the contract would balloon the deficit: “That’s green-eyeshade stuff.”
This last comment reflects a fault line that would widen in any Republican-led Congress. On the one side are Jack Kemp-style supply-siders like Gingrich and Rep. Richard Armey of Texas, who care more about tax cuts than about deficits. On the other side are deficit hawks like Rep. John Kasich of Ohio, the GOP’s chief green eyeshade, who–along with many GOP senators – cares more about the deficit. Kasich specified some spending cuts to offset Gingrich’s tax-cut-ring promises. But they were not part of the contract itself–and they didn’t come close to covering the goodies offered. “If we win the Congress, we’ll have [the cuts] ready,” Kasich says. In other words, even the most responsible Republicans are, for the purposes of this election, essentially offering the same old pig in a poke.
Gingrich made efforts to dress the pig for a wider audience. All reference to divisive issues like abortion and gun control were deleted from the contract. Every clause–from term limits to giving more social security to affluent seniors–was included only after it had been approved by at least 60 percent of the voters in public-opinion surveys. (Talk about governing through polls …) But when Charles Millard, a pro-choice COP House candidate from New York, read the fine print in the attached documents, he found that the so-called “gag rule” barring abortion counseling had been quietly reinstated. He didn’t sign. The clauses pledging to clean up politics also rang a little hollow, considering that the GOP was simultaneously trying to scuttle a Clinton bill to crack down on lobbyists.
That’s the House. If the Senate went Republican, the road would be less bumpy. Right now, Democrats propose and Republicans block; under a GOP Senate, the Republicans would propose and Democrats would block. Either way, Senate rules make sure that almost nothing passes without some kind of bipartisan coalition. There’s even an argument that a GOP Senate could be more productive. As majority leader, Bob Dole might have an incentive to prove that he can bust through gridlock. “I can see it: Dole proposes health care, it passes, and Clinton signs it,” says one Senate staffer. “Dole is not going to want to run against Clinton in 1996 on blocking health-care reform.”
New COP Senate committee chairmanships would be the most colorful change, and the most harmful to Clinton. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, D’Amato would use his subpoena power to sponsor endless hearings on the Clintons’ past. With Rep. Jim Leach holding the same chairmanship in the House, Congress under the GOP would be all Whitewater, all the time. Jesse Helms might be bumped by the leadership as chairman of Senate Foreign Relations (in favor of Richard Lugar), but he would get another big committee. In the Senate it can take only three years to win a subcommittee chairmanship. That means that Oliver North, if elected, could soon chair, say, the subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations.
