Governors v. Congress

Sir, — The February/March 2000 issue of Policy Review carried an article by David Winston ("The GOP’s Two Brands") arguing that there were two "brands" in the Republican Party: the governors and the Republican Congress. Winston argued that the governors have been more successful and the Republican presidential candidate and the Republican Party should look to the governors rather than the GOP Congress for a successful model.

The Republican governors have won high ratings in the polls. So has Bill Clinton.

The Republican Congress has changed the world. The liberal establishment press has attacked the Republican Congress because of its success in promoting conservative policy victories. The same press has been most supportive of those governors who have done the least to advance the cause of limited government.

Let’s look at the record. In 1994, the Republicans won majorities in the House and Senate and won a net gain of 11 governors for a total of 32 GOP governors.

The Republican Congress passed welfare reform three times — Clinton signed the third effort; passed the Freedom to Farm Act ending the Hoover/Roosevelt/Stalin agricultural five year plans; passed the first tax cut in 16 years; began rebuilding the nation’s defenses; passed a law making the deployment of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative American policy; reformed Medicare; passed Medical Savings Accounts; and held down spending such that the 10 year projections for deficits are $6 trillion less than Clinton’s and we now run surpluses rather than deficits. Congress passed other bills that Clinton vetoed: the partial birth abortion ban, school choice for low-income students in Washington, D.C. The abolition of the death tax. Expanding iras and 40l(k)s, sending Medicaid to the states.

Of the now 30 Republican governors, how many have accomplished one half as much in the same five years as the Republican Congress? And 15 of those Republican governors now have complete Republican control of both houses of the state legislature.

And how about electoral success? The GOP has won three congressional elections in a row. The House majority fell by eight in 1996 and five in 1998. A loss of 13 seats of a total of 236 or 5.5 percent while the Senate has increased its Republican members from 53 to 55 (a 4 percent gain), and since 1994 Republican governors have gone from 32 GOP governorships to 30 or a loss of 6 percent.

The Republican Congress’s approval numbers and the generic polling numbers have increased dramatically from their low numbers immediately following the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Since January 1999 House Republican support among women has increased 14 percent, among independents by 19 percent. The GOP now polls ahead of Democrats in the generic ballot test.

And House and Senate Republicans have not done anything destructive. Republican governors have. Marc Racicot of Montana actually vetoed his Republican legislature’s law to enforce paycheck protection; he threatened to veto school choice and right to work legislation. Utah’s Gov. Leavitt has spent the past year campaigning to tax the Internet. Several governors have spent their political capital getting taxpayer funding for sports stadiums and raising gas taxes.

There are bright spots. James Gilmore of Virginia stands out as a strong governor who has brought his party to majority status while cutting taxes and promoting conservative causes nationally — e.g., not taxing the Internet. Florida’s Jeb Bush, only a year in office, has cut taxes, abolished racial preferences, and passed a statewide school choice measure and is likely to reform his state worker pension system this spring.

The heart of the Reagan Republican majority, however, is the Republican Congress. Republican governors have the power that comes from patronage, state contracts, and the executive branch’s command of the bully pulpit. To date, while some accomplishments have been won, they have not used this great power to advance the conservative agenda as successfully as the Republican Congress.

Grover G. Norquist
Americans for Tax Reform
Washington, D.C.

The Author Responds

Grover G. Norquist’s response to my article, "The GOP’s Two Brands," only reaffirms many of my points. One of my major contentions is that a key difference between Republican governors and the Congress is their focus on people first, then policy. Norquist’s similar focus on policy is abundantly clear from his letter. In it, he mentions numerous policy initiatives, but never mentions "people" or "voters." In the "policy-first world," it’s almost as if people are extraneous. Only policy matters. Policy is important, but it should be viewed and developed through a prism that reflects people’s needs and wants.

Norquist implies that there’s something questionable in the governors’ strong popularity by lumping them in with Clinton, who enjoys continuing popularity in polls. If we’ve learned nothing else this year, we’ve learned the effectiveness and wisdom of comparing any Republican to Bill Clinton.

Which gets to another point in my article: that too many Beltway Republicans are totally focused on Clinton rather than creating a Republican agenda.

Norquist also cites statistics to show that Republican governors run a poor third in electoral gains when compared to House or Senate Republicans. Yet in 1997 and 1998, in the 38 states electing governors, you see the real difference in stark political terms. In these states Republican candidates for governor got 4.6 million more votes than 1998 GOP House candidates. Republican governors beat their Democratic counterparts by 7.5 percent, while in these states House Republicans won by 1 percent. Had the House Republicans managed the same margin as the governors, they would have achieved the expected historical outcome of a party in the second midterm election of a sitting president — a significant pickup of seats instead of a five seat loss.

That margin was the difference between solidifying a Republican majority in the House and their present slim margin.

In recent weeks, House Republicans have begun to see improvement in their job approval numbers. The change is due, in large part, to their move away from a pure policy focus to a broader approach in which emphasis is also placed on communicating the benefits of policy initiatives to the American people, a strategy pushed by Conference Chairman J.C. Watts. These policy initiatives aren’t just abstract intellectual concepts. They are solutions that will impact people’s lives on a daily basis, and the public is beginning to understand that. In December 1998, 36 percent of the electorate approved of the job Republicans in Congress were doing. Now that number is around 51 percent. Each percentage point represents about 2 million people; so this shift means that about 30 million more Americans have a more favorable view of Republicans in Congress. Although this shows that the situation for House Republicans has improved, if congressional elections were held today, it is not clear who would win the House, Republicans or Democrats — which is an improvement from a year ago.

Norquist also ticks off a number of legislative actions taken by the Congress — the farm bill, national defense, Medicare, death taxes, IRAs etc. — as proof of the legislative superiority of their record. Most of these issues are the sole purview of the federal government, and Republicans should get credit for their progress. But implying that Republican governors are not as committed to Republican principles because their issues are state issues makes no sense.

A look at the governors’ records provides equal reason for celebrating the progress of conservative ideas at the state level — for example, the implementation of Medicare and welfare reforms, lower taxes, education reform, lower crime rates. Criticism of this record is distressing and doesn’t reflect the basic political shift that has occurred in this country. People want solutions, not dogma — whether left or right. They like Gov. Thompson of Wisconsin because he gave children the opportunity to have a better education with his bold school charter program. They like Gov. Engler of Michigan because he helped give people their dignity back with his extraordinarily successful welfare to work program. They like Gov. Whitman of New Jersey because she gave people in her state the resources to better provide for their families’ health care, education, and retirement by cutting taxes in her state 37 times. These governors weren’t trying to be conservative for the sake of being conservative. They were implementing conservative ideas to provide real solutions for real problems that people have. They were focused on the solution, not the ideology.

But equally important, these governors took the time to frame their ideas and communicate them to ensure they were clearly understood in order to develop support for their policy initiatives. The voters in their states have responded with enthusiastic support, which has also helped grow the Republican Party in those states.

Finally, I have to completely disagree with Norquist that the heart of the Reagan Republican majority is found within the Republican Congress. President Reagan always understood one thing — that the people run this country. He had a unique ability to go around the power elite directly to the people. That’s where his political strength was, and it is where the governors’ is now, and that is where Republicans in Congress are trying to go.

David Winston
Alexandria, Va.

The Politics of Tax Cuts

 Sir, — Bruce Bartlett’s assessment ("The Trouble with Tax Cuts," December 1999/January 2000) of the public apathy over cutting taxes is no surprise to those of us who work daily to mobilize grass-roots conservatives. During the 1999 budget debate, we found little grass-roots enthusiasm for Congress’s $792 billion tax cut. There were three primary reasons for this lack of enthusiasm: (1) activists didn’t trust the Republican Congress to deliver a meaningful tax cut, especially in the face of a Clinton veto; (2) some conservatives were swayed by Clinton’s argument that the best use of the budget surplus is to reduce the debt; and (3) many more believed that Congress’s tax bill was just another attempt to tinker with a tax code that should be scrapped and replaced with a flatter, fairer, simpler code.

As Bartlett suggests, while tax cuts per se don’t resonate with typical Americans, fundamental tax reform has tremendous resonance. We’ve found that people viscerally understand that the tax code is unfair, it punishes our everyday values, it’s too complex, and it’s out of step with our new, digital economy. They are not moved by the patchwork tax bills that cater to various interest groups, but they can be motivated by a plan that promises radical change.

Indeed, just two months after Clinton vetoed Congress’s tax bill, more than 500 activists packed a room in Orlando, Fla., for CSE Foundation’s "Scrap the Code" debate between Majority Leader Dick Armey and Billy Tauzin. More recently in Manchester, N.H. more than 175 people came out on a cold night just nine days before Christmas to hear Republican Reps. John E. Sununu and John Linder debate the merits of the flat tax versus the national retail sales tax.

These and dozens of similar "Scrap the Code" events sponsored by cse Foundation over the past two years are a powerful sign that Americans are hungry for real change and will respond to credible plans to overhaul the status quo. So rather than lament the decline of tax cuts as a political issue, political conservatives should raise the banner of fundamental tax reform. The American people are with us, they’re just waiting for leadership.

Scott A. Hodge
Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation
Washington, D.C.

Sir, — Bruce Bartlett’s article takes a hard look at why the case for tax cuts is failing. But is the case for tax cuts actually failing? Bartlett did not mention anything about the population from which the samples were taken by the pollsters. Wasn’t it a biased population with regard to tax cuts?

Can we surmise what the population consists of? If 40 percent of the taxpayers pay no taxes, will they be interested in a tax cut? Obviously not. They will go for something from which they can benefit, perhaps education or health care. Of the remaining 60 percent, how many are Democrats and representatives of lobby groups that are for no tax cut since only the rich will benefit? A reasonable guess is half of them. This gives us an additional 30 percent that will not support a tax cut. This adds up to 70 percent of the population that will not make a case for tax cuts at this date. Although the mathematics may be crude, the indication is strong that the population is biased and any sample taken from it will also be biased. What can one expect?

Maybe a more accurate answer can be achieved if samples are taken from the population consisting of the top 25 percent of taxpayers. Another group that can be polled are the senior citizens who understand the effect inflation has on their savings and investments. They are the ones who have the highest effective tax rates. Polls, by themselves, do not constitute an analysis of the problem.

Joseph G. Kuzawinski
Niskayuna, N.Y.

Sir, — The liberal media have gone a long way to assist the liberals in Congress to convince the American people that taxes belong to Congress and a tax cut is "giving" money back. The folks who pay the most taxes deserve the lion’s share of benefit from a tax cut, i.e., the ability to keep more of their own money to spend as they see fit rather than sending it to Washington so that politicians and bureaucrats can decide. The liberals treat taxes as a zero-sum game. They have no answer to the fact that with reduced tax rates, the wealthiest Americans actually paid more in taxes in terms of pure dollars during the 1980s; they paid an increased percentage of the overall tax burden during the 1980s; and federal revenue increased dramatically (almost doubling between 1980 and 1990) during the 1980s. I have yet to hear one whisper about this from a mainstream media source.

Even more sadly I have yet to hear more than a whimper about these facts from the current Republican leadership in Congress. They seem to feel they must apologize for the affluence of the 1980s.

Ronald Reagan’s greatness stemmed from his steadfast vision of what America could be again. He did not let what the mainstream media might report keep him from "staying the course." Oh, that Republicans would have the fortitude to stand firm in that way again. They looked good in 1994 and since then have largely paid lip service to the concept. History will look more favorably on the Reagan presidency in another 25 or 50 years than it does even now.

Gary Luft
Midland, Tex.

Sir, — How can we argue the "tax cut" question if we don’t insist on making the distinction between tax rates and tax revenue?

It is disgraceful of conservatives not to always insist on speaking of rate cuts. Make one word out of it: Ratecuts. Ratecuts. Ratecuts.

Surely, I don’t need to explain the Laffer curve to Policy Review.

Don’t let the bad guys trap us into using their terminology. That lets them set the agenda for discussion. No wonder we haven’t won yet.

Arthur McComb
Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 

 The Reagan Reputation

Sir, — I read with great interest Paul Kengor’s article, "Reagan Among the Professors: His Surprising Reputation" (December 1999/January 2000). However, I would like to make one correction regarding Professor Kengor’s characterization of my article in the Fall 1997 issue of Political Science Quarterly. In that piece I was not seeking to determine which leader was most responsible for the end of the Cold War, as he states. Rather, the article contends that the Reagan administration adopted a more conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union in January 1984, and considers why such a change occurred.

The research for the psq article ultimately led to a book, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War. While the book seeks neither to condemn nor to applaud President Reagan, it does conclude that the president played a far more active role in the making of foreign policy than his contemporaries gave him credit for.

When I began presenting my research at conferences during the mid-1990s my findings were met with one of two responses: polite silence, or jokes about the president’s perceived incompetence. Rarely did a colleague engage in serious discussions about the Reagan presidency. These meetings proved to be frustrating experiences, and I resigned myself to the idea that my book would be dismissed out of hand.

However, the climate within academe has shifted. During the past few years I have found my colleagues to be treating the Reagan period with far greater seriousness, curiosity, and integrity. At conferences scholars have increasingly been engaging in meaningful debates about the president and his legacy. One example of these shifting views has been the reviews of my book, which have been overwhelmingly positive.

I am not sure why this shift has occurred, but it underscores the integrity of my colleagues. This is what the spirit of academic inquiry should be all about.

Beth A. Fischer
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

Sir, — As a political science Ph.D. candidate, I am well aware of the negative treatment of Ronald Reagan, especially among many of my peers. Any defense of Reagan’s policies causes me to be labeled a "right wing, Christian Coalition nut," which apparently places me outside of the graduate student cognoscenti. Among mostly liberal academic professors, however, I have noticed a reluctant acknowledgement of Reagan’s leadership and administrative abilities. While they do not go out of the way to recognize his eight years in office or his many accomplishments, when the "Reagan debate" is raised they present a fair treatment.

Also as a student of political science I, like Kengor, have been astounded at the acknowledgement by those who are the cognoscenti in the political science field regarding Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Kengor’s article reads like a who’s who among political science elites, and their treatment of Reagan is fair and highly favorable. This is clearly important for the "real Reagan record" and his lasting legacy.

I would be remiss, however, if I did not point out a most troubling issue with regard to academic treatment of Ronald Reagan. With regard to the "two presidencies" theory, the foreign presidency and the domestic presidency, Kengor clearly demonstrates that Reagan’s record in the former is beginning to be reevaluated, while I am afraid in the latter, this is not the case. As one interested in the domestic presidency, I have seen nothing in any of the major issues (e.g., civil rights, health care, welfare) that would support the concept of a reevaluation among academic professors. As a professor of criminal justice I am even more aware of this treatment among criminologists and academics, who treat Reagan’s domestic policies regarding crime and drugs with contempt.

Although there is clearly not enough space to review all of the criticisms, several examples among criminal justice elites should suffice. One of the first salvos fired was by Tony Platt in Crime and Social Justice in a 1987 article entitled "U.S. Criminal Justice in the Reagan Era: An Assessment." His "assessment" was an outright attack on every aspect of the Reagan administration’s crime and drug polices — notwithstanding his acknowledgment that Reagan had to pass both crime and drug legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. Susan Caringella-MacDonald, a sociologist, in the journal Contemporary Crises in 1990, rails against the idea that Reagan even addressed the issue of crime, despite her own evidence that crime increased by 5.2 percent from 1975 to 1984, but decreased by 11.2 percent from 1980 to 1984 (a decrease of 15.4 percent after controlling for population). In addition she lambastes Reagan for his "war on drugs," but never acknowledges the crack epidemic of the mid-1980s, which the noted criminologist Alfred Blumstein has stated was the most significant crime event in the 1980s. Simply put, Reagan responded.

Other authors have acknowledged the decrease in crime during Reagan’s two terms in office but have gone out of their way to explain it as nothing more than demographic change (see Darrell Steffensmeier and Miles D. Harer in a 1991 issue of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency). Michael Tonry, another leader in the criminal justice field, in a 1994 Crime and Delinquency article go so far as to charge Reagan with being a racist (a la the allegations against Nixon), arguing that he was intentionally targeting the black population. Finally, in some cases the allegations have become so derogatory and childish that one wonders how they make it past peer review. Herman Schwendinger and Julia Siegel Schwendinger, regarding Reagan and Bush’s policies on crime and drugs, go so far as to state "if booby prizes for crackpot proposals are to be awarded to anyone, Presidents Reagan and Bush should get them."

I would ardently agree with Kengor’s assessment in terms of the foreign presidency of Ronald Reagan, but would like to highlight that the current assessment of Ronald Reagan’s domestic presidency is not so favorable. I have yet to find one academic journal article or book that has acknowledged Reagan’s successful internal security policy related to crime and drugs, as Kengor has found for Reagan’s external security policies with regard to the Cold War, keeping Iran from dominating the Persian Gulf, or ending the Soviet war against Afghanistan. Data show a declining crime rate during Reagan’s presidency, and policies that were put in place during Reagan’s tenure that have contributed to further declines in rates in the 1990s — especially his fast and definitive response to the crack cocaine epidemic. Reagan’s vindication among academics, at least for now, is relegated to his successful "foreign presidency."

Willard M. Oliver
Glenville State College
Glenville, W. Va.

Governing by Supermajorities

Sir, — The legislature, the executive and the courts increasingly have been untrue to the Framers’ scheme of limited government, and this tempts us to create new structural mechanisms to rein in federal spending. John O. McGinnis and Michael B. Rappaport have eloquently pointed out the need for restraint and offer as the mechanism a rule that increased appropriations should require a supermajority vote of Congress ("The Case for Supermajority Rules," December 1999/January 2000). Unfortunately, it is by no means clear that enactment of the proposal would lead to less spending. The result instead might be additional entrenchment of favoritism, further encroachment of the judiciary into the establishment of national priorities, and an even more demoralized electorate.

I fear that McGinnis and Rappaport underestimate the creativity of the K Street lobbyists, who angle for advantages for small interest groups, and craven politicians, who pander with advantages to large interest groups. As the authors themselves note, the need to obtain a supermajority for necessary spending gives lobbyists for special interests more ability to hold out until their pet provisions are included. The creation of the complex body of rules that will become necessary to define "spending," "entitlements," "taxes," and "programs" will make legislation more of an insiders’ game than ever. The inevitable result will be that interest groups will make their incursions into the public fisc more obscure and that a corps of administrative mandarins will engage in increasingly arcane rulemaking in the attempt to keep up. Ultimately, of course, disputes will wind up in the hand of judges who will take the Congress as their ward and further erode the doctrine of separation of powers.

Consider the analogous attempt to regulate campaign spending. Disclosure requirements aren’t enough, the zealots say. Chasing from "hard" money, to "soft" money, to "indirect" expenditures by independent supporters, they would push their point until free speech is drastically reduced. Could the attempt to constrain governmental spending by new mechanisms result in the creation of less ingenious incursions into our liberties? In an era where Republican candidates vie to spend national tax dollars to hire local teachers, perhaps a rededication to the essential nature of federalism and fidelity to the constitutional doctrine of enumerated powers is what we really need.

If the electorate cannot discipline itself, there is not much hope that the attachment of bells and whistles to the constitutional scheme is going to save it.

Steven J. Eagle
George Mason University
Arlington, Va.

Sir, — Although the authors, John O. McGinnis and Michael B. Rappaport, make an interesting case, I believe their theory suffers from at least one fatal flaw. It is not even the simple majority who assemble major bills that expand government, but a small minority who happen to be members of one committee or other because of the length of time they have been in Congress. These committees go about "buying" the votes of other congressmen by adding various "favors" (i.e. pork) until they can pass the bill largely intact and unchallenged.

Adding supermajority requirements would not change this wasteful system and could even make things worse, since more votes would need to be "purchased" by the committee working on the bill.

I believe that term limits are still a better first step, because they attack the wasteful seniority system adopted by the professional career politicians we now are afflicted with.

Cliff Copass
Greenfield, Wisc.

Russia After Yeltsin

Sir, — I read with interest Ariel Cohen’s analysis of the Russian situation after the election of Putin ("From Yeltsin to Putin," April/May 2000). As usual, he is right on target on many issues. History’s assessment of Yeltsin will probably depend on what course Russia takes under Putin; Yeltsin’s political instincts were more democratic than his governing stance; and nurturing civil society in Russia is crucial.

However, as has often been the case in American Sovietology (now, Russology?), the Enlightenment-generated taxonomies Cohen employs fail to take into account the process of Russia’s territorial expansion and the legacy of expectations, perceptions, and fears which the expansion has generated. The taxonomies espoused by American researchers fail to encompass what might be called areas of indeterminacy in Russian discourse that Western discourse has seldom penetrated.

Winston Churchill’s saying that Russia is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma alluded to these areas, and so did Count Mikhail M. Speranskii’s remark that "in Russia, [we] seemingly have everything: institutions, people, development, industry — but all this is make-believe." The popular rendition of this situation is the expression "the Potemkin village."

My study of these issues (as expressed in Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (published in March 2000)) indicates that Russian colonialism was one reason why these areas of indeterminacy have arisen. The process of Russia’s colonial expansion has been ignored in the West, because colonies have generally been regarded as territories overseas.

In the Russian case, colonies are contiguous to ethnically Russian lands. The Russian state was enlarged by a series of wars, annexations, and diplomatic maneuvers whose concealment left "areas of indeterminacy" in Russian thinking and discourse. Just as Australia or Canada are not "English" (in the sense of being legitimate possessions of the London government), so are Siberia and the Far East not "Russian." The present dependence on Moscow of these and other territories will eventually be dissolved, and the only question is how. At present, Russia is a federal state only on paper. A genuinely federal status of many of Russia’s contiguous colonies would be a preferred way for a devolution of power.

But, as the second Chechen war of 1999-2000 has demonstrated, other and less fortunate solutions are also possible. Many of Russia’s problems stem from an impossibility to govern from Moscow territories that are incompatibly diverse from the point of view of ethnicity, history, economy, and demography.

Problems related to Russia’s colonial history need to be integrated into discourse about Russia, in my opinion. Otherwise, even such excellent analyses of the present situation as those of Ariel Cohen will continue to be incomplete.

Ewa Thompson
Rice University
Houston, Tex.

What’s Next In Asia?

Sir, — Implications of "American hegemony" aside, there is little reason to doubt Ashley J. Tellis’s assertion that the United States must remain actively engaged with Asia’s nations ("Smoke, Fire, and What to Do in Asia," April/May 2000). But Tellis only tangentially explains how America must go about ensuring peace and stability in the Pacific when he writes

"through forward deployment, if necessary." American "critical interests" are best realized by a forward-deployed American presence, primarily in the form of naval forces, above, on, and below the sea. Nothing in the entire American military arsenal can provide the combination of endurance, stealth, speed, and firepower of aircraft carriers, submarines, and an amphibious ready group of Marines.

The problem is that there aren’t enough subs and ships to go around. America cannot reasonably expect to have influence in the Pacific — or protect itself from threats across the Pacific — if current shipbuilding trends continue. Already, the Pentagon has put the brakes on the misguided submarine levels called for in the 1999 Quadrennial Defense Review, which called for a fleet of only 50 attacks subs, a number that, once deployments and maintenance cycles are taken into account, allows for only about a dozen subs available in the Pacific and Indian oceans on any given day. And though the Joint Chiefs now agree that a higher number is needed, the fact remains that the United States has built only five subs since 1990.

Carriers face the same dilemma. The once-sacrosanct number of carriers required — 15 — has dwindled to 12, even though those 12 aren’t enough to satisfy national security requirements. The "musical chairs" shifting of carriers during the air war in Kosovo is one example of this. The Enterprise had to leave the Mediterranean a week before the Kosovo war started to provide aircraft for patrols over Iraq. It wasn’t until two weeks after the war started that the Roosevelt carrier battle group arrived on station in the Mediterranean. That move, in turn, left the western Pacific without an American carrier for weeks.

Does this sound like a force posture capable of meeting the Clinton administration’s warfighting requirement of two overlapping theater wars? It sure doesn’t to me.

Phillip Thompson
Lexington Institute
Arlington, Va.