The 106th, $640-Billion Congress

WASHINGTON —  Unable or unwilling to bridge divides on a host of major issues from health care to gun control, the 106th Congress may be remembered as the one that tried to spend its way out of trouble.

While the Republicans who lead the House and Senate trumpet their stewardship of the nation’s finances during an era of budget surpluses, the reality is that the fiscal discipline that was the hallmark of the conservative GOP takeover of Congress in 1995 has been tossed out the window.

Congress is on track to spend $640 billion on discretionary programs in the fiscal year that started Oct. 1. For perspective, that is $14 billion more than President Clinton’s first request, $40 billion more than the budget Republicans adopted last April and $100 billion more than limits set under the milestone 1997 balanced-budget agreement.

And the check-writing isn’t over. With only seven of the 13 annual spending bills signed into law, the totals could well increase as lawmakers prepare for an unusual post-election session to wrap up work.

13th Stopgap Spending Resolution

On Thursday, the House approved a stopgap spending resolution to keep the government running another 24 hours, the 13th for fiscal 2001. The Senate, acting under a special procedure that allows nearly all members to be out of town, followed suit later in the day. No serious legislative negotiations were underway as all eyes were turned to the Tuesday elections.

The congressional spending spree--a bipartisan phenomenon in a time notable for precious little cross-aisle cooperation--is chewing up the projected surplus that both major presidential candidates assume will be theirs to use on new programs or tax cuts.

“We’ve already had too much spending in these appropriations bills, and there’s plenty of blame to go around on that,” acknowledged Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). But Lott blamed the Clinton administration for the fiscal disarray.

“How much is enough?” Lott asked. “When you have the president coming up and asking for billions [of dollars] above his own requests . . . where can we stop that?”

Clinton, firing back, complained Thursday that Republican leaders had failed to finish their annual budget work but had nonetheless larded spending bills “with political, election-year pork.”

It will be difficult to fully assess the 106th Congress until the last gavel falls sometime after the elections. And unlike the two most recent lame-duck sessions in 1998 (when the House impeached Clinton) and 1994 (when Congress approved global trade legislation), the upcoming session appears to have a fairly broad agenda that includes education spending, tax breaks totaling $240 billion over 10 years, immigration reform, workplace safety rules and a proposed minimum wage increase. Even Thursday, congressional Republicans and White House officials still were talking about enacting a patients’ bill of rights--though, tellingly, they were talking about it in separate news conferences, not jointly at a bargaining table.

But for all the question marks, one conclusion is clear: Many, perhaps most, difficult issues have been shoved off to another year, another president, another Congress. Examples abound of proposals that seemed to have significant popular support but ultimately went nowhere:

A prescription drug benefit in federal health insurance for the elderly; proposals for trigger locks on handguns and a requirement for background checks on all transactions at weekend gun shows; reform of rules governing health maintenance organizations; and campaign finance reform (although a modest bill was enacted this year to allow public scrutiny of some independent political committees).

Perhaps the most important long-term domestic issues of all, Social Security and Medicare reform, never had a chance.

One problem was that the 106th Congress began in the most heated partisan atmosphere in a generation as the Senate tried President Clinton on impeachment articles approved by the House--the first such trial in more than a century.

The Senate ultimately voted, largely on party lines, not to remove Clinton from office. But a bitter, unproductive tone was set that is the subtext of criticism to this day from Republicans that Clinton cannot be trusted on spending bills and that his vetoes--the latest, just before midnight Monday--represent a breach of good faith.

Another problem is that the 2000 elections hold such enormous potential for change--with control of the White House, the House and perhaps even the Senate up for grabs--that there is incentive on both sides to stall.

“A toxic mix of election-year politics and mutual distrust” has stymied deal-making, said John J. Pitney Jr., an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Trade Policy an Exception

One exception that proves the rule of legislative stalemate is trade policy. This year Congress and Clinton enacted two laws to help open markets to U.S. goods. One was a modest initiative for trade with the Caribbean Basin and sub-Saharan Africa. The other was a landmark law granting permanent normal trade relations to communist China. The China trade bill passed the House in May after a frenetic lobbying push in which Clinton and his impeachment nemesis, Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), together overcame the opposition of trade unions and the chamber’s top Democratic leaders. It then passed the Senate after Republican leader Lott brought it up in September.

Clinton and the Republicans had incentive on that issue to work together. The business community was pushing hard for the deal, and Clinton was seeking to leave a lasting mark in foreign and economic policy.

But such incentives have been missing on most other issues. As a result, Congress has only scored other achievements by default. It spends with abandon. And it is reducing the national debt--a priority for both parties mainly because Republicans have been unable to enact the tax cuts they want.