Yesterday, House Republicans announced their priorities for the year:
marriage-penalty relief; education savings accounts; the Talent-Watts
"community renewal" legislation; paying down debt, with an eye toward
retiring it entirely. Several of these are good ideas. But overall the
agenda has a nice-but-nowhere quality to it. It is certainly not a serious
attempt to address the most important issues before the nation. There's
nothing here about rebuilding our defenses. Marriage-penalty relief is
essentially a gimmick, unless it's actually the case that the penalty has
actually caused a devastating epidemic of cohabitation. And that's the
optimistic view: Reducing the marriage penalty can be a foolish social
policy if it takes the form of letting two-earner families pay less in
taxes than similarly situated one-earner families (the form it has taken
in George W. Bush's tax plan).
Eliminating the debt suffers the same flaws on a much larger scale. It's
too abstract an issue to motivate many voters, however well it may poll.
It also doesn't do much good for the country. True, retiring debt is a
better use for tax revenues than most new spending programs (although not
as good as defense spending). But by reducing the interest costs to the
federal government, debt reduction frees up money for new spending. (Or,
theoretically, for tax cuts. But refusing to cut taxes today in order to
cut taxes in some hypothetical tomorrow is not only politically risky,
it's economically foolish. It deprives the country of the extra wealth
that improved incentives would bring in the interim.) Actually eliminating
the national debt, meanwhile, would be a disaster, destabilizing the bond
market and tanking the dollar. Have the Republicans even thought about
this?
The high point of Republican (and, more important, conservative) fortunes
in this decade came before the party embarked on its budget-balancing
adventure in 1995. It's been mostly downhill from there. A commitment to
eliminate the debt would handicap the party for decades. Which candidate
are voters going to prefer? The one who offers them free prescription
drugs and other goodies? Or the one who says no, we have to use that money
to improve the federal balance sheet — and then can't explain why that's
important? George W. Bush understands that the pressure to spend the money
would be irresistible. That's why he argued in the debate Thursday night
that Washington shouldn't get its hands on the money in the first place.
Congressional Republicans could have decided to introduce Bush's tax plan,
with some modifications, as their own. Oddly, they're following John
McCain's debt-reduction approach instead.
It's only fair to acknowledge the extreme difficulty of devising a
workable agenda given that Republicans have a mere five-seat majority. On
the other hand, it's possible that the leadership's fixation on keeping
control of the floor and not losing votes has become self-defeating. It is
reminiscent, indeed, of President Bush's obsession with not letting any of
his vetoes be overridden. That meant that Bush had to sign a lot of
legislation he should have vetoed. He would have been better off letting
the Democratic Congress pass bad laws over his objections and then
campaigning against them in 1992. Instead, Bush took responsibility for
everything Washington did. Worse, the strategy collapsed in the waning
days of the 1992 campaign when the Congress finally did override a Bush
veto (of a cable-regulation bill).
Like Bush, congressional Republicans are letting institutional
considerations take priority over the framing of issues. The alternative
would be to stand for a more ambitious, popular agenda, accepting some
short-term policy defeats in the interest of long-term political success.
That might mean, for instance, letting the Democrats pass some crazy
health-care regulations rather than trying to pass some slightly less
crazy Republican version of the same bill. It's a risky strategy. But no
less so is the current one, which looks unlikely to excite conservative
voters and - remembering, again, the example of Bush -- will probably not
save the Republicans from losing control of the floor anyway.
