THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 3, 1996 TAG: 9610030034
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 66 lines
The cliche for the 104th Congress is ``in like a lion, out like a lamb.'' Out like a sham, cynics might say. The take-no-prisoners revolutionaries of two years ago turned into go-along-to-get-along pols by last weekend.
The Republican majority came to Washington, especially a large class of House freshmen, vowing no more business as usual. They would reform the way Congress works, slash entitlements, balance the budget, return power to the states, downsize government.
In fact, the 104th will be remembered as a potent reforming Congress, but the actual performance has fallen far short of the rhetoric. And the flurry of activity in the past two months had more to do with re-election than revolution.
The 104th packs up having put through a big change in welfare that may or may not work. A long-overdue overhaul of telecom regulations was passed that brings the government more in line with reality. The next president will have a line-item veto and we'll see if it's the pork-cutting panacea some have claimed.
Modest health-care reform makes insurance portable, though not necessarily affordable. A farm bill will eventually reduce government subsidies, but during the transition farmers will actually get more government handouts while doing less.
On the debit side, Republicans approved limits on shareholder lawsuits that do not favor the small investor. They have permitted some questionable encroachments on civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. The GOP failed to pass several bad ideas - term limits, a balanced-budget amendment - but not for lack of trying.
Taking power, the GOP majority of the 104th claimed it was going to put the country on the path to a balanced budget without raising taxes. That would have required slowing the growth in entitlement spending and slashing dozens of other programs.
Like Clinton two years before on health-care reform, the GOP appeared to believe it had a broader mandate than the public had given. When it overreached, the revolutionaries found themselves on the wrong side of public opinion.
In a strategic retreat, Republicans went along with a minimum-wage hike. Democrats demagogued the Medicare issue, but the GOP left itself open to attack by not making a persuasive case that more than $200 billion less in Medicare spending could be achieved without affecting the quality of care. Coupling less spending on programs for seniors with tax cuts that favored the prosperous doomed both initiatives.
By the end of the session, the strategic retreat had turned into near capitulation as the revolutionaries embraced the kind of pork they'd come into office promising to cut.
While boasting of saving thousands on ice delivery to Congress, the GOP agreed to spend $9.3 billion more on the Pentagon, $4.8 billion more for education, $270 million more for EPA, $1.77 billion more for law enforcement and more for public works, Amtrak and so on.
Not all those decisions were wrong, but they weren't always as advertised either. And as a result, the next Congress will have to cut $10 billion more than previously planned to return to a balanced-budget path.
By not living up to its bold talk, the GOP looks as if it's failed. But viewed objectively, the 104th compiled a record of progress on many long-stalled issues and behaved with unaccustomed fiscal responsibility. In the process, it forced Clinton to compromise - on welfare and immigration reform, for instance - about as often as he forced it to compromise. Two steps forward, one step back may not be pretty, but it's the way the system is designed to work. by CNB