Rather than joining hands to celebrate their bipartisan achievement on the China trade bill, House members on May 24 immediately headed to separate mega-million-dollar fund-raising events where they bashed the other party with election-year hyperbole. The symbolism was apt.
By all appearances, the House's stressful and uncharacteristic abandonment of partisanship during the vote over permanently normalizing trade relations with China will quickly become a dim memory. Members of both parties have made clear that they are eager to return to posturing-as-usual during the mere 12 weeks of legislative business scheduled before the 106th Congress shuts down.
To be sure, Republicans and Democrats vow to press a heavy workload after the weeklong Memorial Day recess-including spending bills, tax cuts, and politically popular proposals designed to appeal to voters. And the effort to grease the China deal has left some residual promises of bipartisan cooperation.
But congressional leaders of both parties, as well as a lame-duck President Clinton, face a familiar dilemma in the politically divided government: Should they cooperate in the interest of scoring some legacies that might also prove useful as election-year fodder, or would it make more sense simply to draw the lines and let the voters decide?
For Republican leaders in charge of the legislative agenda, their first inclination was to use the trade vote to hype what they see as their party's steadfast commitment to the nation's business. "Democrats feel that it's in their best interests to be obstructionist," said House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma in an interview. "But [Speaker] Denny Hastert changes the tone. His only special interest is to get the House's work done."
As Republicans seek to regroup for the homestretch drive to adjournment, tentatively scheduled for Oct. 6, they will refocus their priorities on the "three T's" that they laid out early this year-taxes, technology, and trade, according to senior aides. The House's 237-197 vote for PNTR with China, on top of final approval earlier this month of legislation to lower trade barriers with African and Caribbean nations, largely completes the trade leg of the Republicans' trifecta.
House Republicans have been steadily hammering away at the other two pieces. On tax cuts, they have scored some successes with their strategy to shift from last year's omnibus $792 billion bill to rifle-shot appeals to targeted constituencies. They have won Clinton's signature on their bill to remove the earnings limitations for Social Security beneficiaries. The House also passed a bill to eliminate the tax code's "marriage penalty," although the measure became bogged down in a procedural morass in the Senate.
House Republicans have been churning out a host of other bills banning or repealing certain taxes, including a continuation of the moratorium on Internet taxes and a phaseout of the telephone excise tax. In line for possible action after the Memorial Day recess are a reduction in inheritance taxes and an expansion of retirement incentives.
House Republicans have also made progress with their so-called eContract 2000 on technology. Besides the Internet tax measure, they are moving legislation to provide additional immigration visas for high-tech workers and an "e-signatures" bill that would set a legal standard for e-commerce and online contracts.
As House Republican leaders and White House operatives worked to lock in the final votes on PNTR, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, told reporters: "I think this is a great opportunity for us to work with the President, and it has been a good working relationship."
Hastert, in particular, has been trying to find common legislative ground with the President. Aides reported that Clinton and Hastert made progress in recent weeks on several issues, including the marriage-penalty measure, health care, and a proposal to provide community renewal tax incentives to low-income neighborhoods.
For many Republicans, their agenda serves a dual purpose in a campaign year. It gives them-rather than Democratic leaders-an opportunity to join hands with Clinton at bill-signing ceremonies and to appeal to Republican stalwarts. In the words of Hastert spokesman John Feehery, "These proposals [particularly the tax cuts] matter to our base," adding: "Democrats will find any reason to invite a veto. We will have to work through that."
However, the recent gridlock on the Senate floor presents an obstacle that could keep the House-passed bills from even making it to the White House. The tensions in the Senate escalated on May 17, when, following several days of legislative inaction because of Democratic demands for gun control votes, the Senate's two leaders attacked each other in terms not normally heard in that chamber.
Senate Democratic leaders have made clear that they will continue to use their leverage under their chamber's rules to influence the scheduling and debate of nearly all issues. Although Senate leaders from the two parties reached something of a truce on May 23 to process dozens of stalled judicial and executive branch nominations, Democrats held firm to their threat to slow down Senate GOP plans.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said in recent days that it is "going to be a very difficult year" for the 13 must-pass spending bills in the Senate. "There is a logjam," Stevens said. "It's totally partisan. It's wrong." Still, some of the bottlenecks on appropriations bills have resulted from intra-GOP disputes over controversial language tacked onto the bills, or from the tight funding levels that Republicans approved as part of their budget resolution in April.
Republicans hope to evade some of the Senate Democrats' delaying tactics this summer by packaging several House-passed tax cuts into one or two budget-reconciliation bills that would be protected by special Senate rules limiting debate.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., has said his chief preference for tax legislation is marriage-penalty relief, but as usual, House and Senate GOP leaders may not be on the same page. "The House is the House. The Senate is the Senate. They have to do what they have to do," Lott said.
On other legislation, Lott voiced hope for final action on several measures that have been stuck in House-Senate conference committees for many months, including gun safety provisions, reforms of health maintenance organizations, and a minimum-wage increase. Although these proposals initially were pushed chiefly by Democrats, GOP leaders are under pressure to move them along-both to respond to political pressures and to break the legislative logjam.
But deadlines already have been set and broken on these and other bills, and additional election-year complications will probably ensue. The minimum-wage hike of $1 per hour, for example, has received less attention in recent weeks because labor leaders have been focused on the China bill. Some health care insiders contend that the HMO bill may be sacrificed because lawmakers believe that voters now favor legislation to provide prescription drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries. In other cases, bills backed by Clinton have stalled because of objections by Democratic lawmakers over Senate procedures.
"The Democrats' Operation Gridlock is in full effect," said Lott spokesman John Czwartacki. "They are trying to throw sand in the gears because they are getting desperate and frustrated."
For their part, Democrats hope to reunite their fractured party and refocus the Washington agenda after the debilitating China debate of recent weeks. "We are going to talk about what we think is important," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Martin Frost of Texas. "We won't accept half-measures.... The President has made clear that he will stick with us on our core issues," including health care and education. Although it will take time to restore Democratic unity, Frost said, "it's not in anyone's interest to elect a Republican President or House."
It may prove easier to reunite the Democratic Party than to mend the wounds between Democrats and organized labor. "The emphasis here will be on Democratic unity," said a House Democratic leadership aide. "I can't say what will happen with labor." Democratic insiders noted with dismay the statement by United Auto Workers President Stephen P. Yokich, which was made on the eve of the China PNTR vote, that America's working families "have no choice but to actively explore alternatives to the two major political parties" in the presidential election.
But the splits are not solely among the Democrats. Some congressional Republicans contend that their leaders ought to simply move to the sidelines and applaud the efforts of their presidential standard-bearer, George W. Bush, rather than spend time on legislative minutiae. "Republicans should talk about tax cuts for everybody and about Social Security reform," said a veteran House GOP aide. "We should talk about whatever Bush wants us to talk about. He has positioned us so that we can win this battle."
Most congressional Republicans dismiss calls for a stand-pat approach in the closing months of the campaign. Such a strategy would be counterproductive, a House GOP leadership aide said. "That would force George Bush to run away from a 'Do-Nothing' Congress," said the aide. "Instead, we have shown an ability for him to embrace us."
For Republicans, as well as Democrats, the hope is that this year's legislative endgame will be a precursor not only of the election, but also of the still-unpredictable legislative scenario for next year.
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