The Scum at the Top

Commentary on the Rats in Washington

Conservatism, Um, Evolving

By George F. Will
Newsweek
© December 8, 2003
Page 110

Congressional Republicans must assume they will never be in the minority and vulnerable to payback. They are mistaken.

By the time the conservatives running Congress and this conservative president are done doing what they think will win the next election, tweezers may be needed to pick up the remnants of conservatism as traditionally understood. Time was, Republicans disdained the political formula supposedly voiced by FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins: "Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect." Now Republicans have amended the formula with an audacity that would make the most ardent New Dealer blush.

The republican recipe for "elect and elect" is:

Tax cuts. Fine. They have carried the economy through a difficult patch. But there is also unbridled spending. (Federal discretionary spending is up a dizzying 26 percent in two years.) Plus tariffs. Which are taxes on American consumers. The most recent, ostensibly intended to save American jobs, protects Americans from, among other dangers, an inundation of inexpensive Chinese bras.

Plus what liberals call "industrial policy" and conservatives used to call "lemon socialism" - loan guarantees, wrinkles in the tax code and other subsidies to private enterprises that evidently cannot prosper in the market without corporate welfare.

Plus the largest expansion of an entitlement since Medicare was enacted 38 years ago. The price put on the prescription-drug benefit - $400 billion over 10 years - is (a) a guess that everyone finds it convenient to accept, (b) probably low for the coming decade and (c) perhaps one fifth the cost of its second decade (see Robert J. Samuelson’s column in last week’s NEWSWEEK).

Now, let us not lapse into modern mugwumpery. There are too many people acting like political virgins, getting the vapors about "lobbyists," "special interests," "pork" and "logrolling." Lobbyists are not only legal, they are necessary. In addition to appetites, they have knowledge about facets of American life that legislators know little of. Taken together, America’s interests, even the dreaded "special" ones, include everybody. Mutual toleration of each other’s pork makes legislative logrolling possible and, hence, often is necessary for legislating in a continental nation with large regional and other differences, and parties with weak ideologies and weaker discipline.

Still, it was difficult to square the energy bill - it also was an agriculture bill, with provisions for putting soybeans and corn in fuels - with Republican principles of respect for markets and skepticism about government management of industries. Fortunately, a filibuster killed the bill for this year. But the prescription-drug entitlement is, as AARP understands, the thin end of a huge wedge that AARP and others will work to drive steadily deeper into future budgets.

Medicare was enacted before many advances in pharmacology. Had pharmacology been as advanced in 1965 as it is today, some drug benefit would have been included then. Besides, Republicans are understandably eager to nullify one of the Democrats’ signature issues by passing this benefit. And some Republicans say, if we don’t pass it, Democrats eventually will, and will do it worse. However, given the minimal reform of Medicare that accompanies the new entitlement, it is becoming less clear how Republicans are the superior stewards of the nation’s fiscal future.

Conservatives correctly fault liberals for being too result-oriented, for bending rules and cutting procedural corners to achieve their goals - often by means of injudicious, essentially legislative, uses of judicial power. But some Republican senators, frustrated by Democratic filibusters against the president’s judicial nominees, may try to incite extreme judicial activism. They are thinking of asking the Supreme Court to discover that such filibusters are unconstitutional. Their theory? The Constitution’s provision that the Senate must consent before judicial nominees can take office supposedly requires that all nominations be brought to a vote.

Even more recklessly, some Republicans - anticipating January 2005, with Bush re-elected and them still control-ling the Senate - want Vice President Cheney, presiding there, to rule that the Senate is not a continuing body, and that therefore a simple majority can rewrite Senate rules.

But even if they confined their rewriting merely to making it easier to end filibusters of judicial nominees, would it be conservative to weaken the filibuster? It is one of the blocking mechanisms that enable intense minorities to slow the governmental juggernaut. Besides, an awful precedent would be set: Senate rules would be permanently in play, tinkered with for partisan advantage by the majority every two years.

When the House of Representatives began voting on the prescription-drug bill, Republicans controlling the House realized they were short of the votes needed for passage. So they set aside their supposedly strict commitment to 15-minute votes, and held the voting open for nearly three hours.

House and Senate Republicans must assume they will never again be in the minority and vulnerable to payback. They are mistaken.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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