The Red and the Blue by Steve Kornacki

Author:Steve Kornacki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Congress adjourned in the wee hours of Saturday, October 8, 1994, with both parties in agreement on exactly one point: there was no sense sticking around even a second longer. The midterms were a month away, members were itching to head home and defend their turf, and anyway, it wasn’t like anything was actually going to happen on Capitol Hill anytime soon, a consensus driven home by one final failure for the majority party. On this occasion, the particular issue involved a lobbying reform bill that Clinton badly wanted to sign, but the pattern was a familiar one. Democrats had the votes to push it through the House, but not without Gingrich and his allies in the grass roots and on the talk-radio airwaves kicking up a mighty fuss and forcing Senate Republicans to decide what was more valuable. They could compromise and watch the White House declare victory, or they could stand together and use their forty-four votes to kill the bill with another filibuster.

By now, it wasn’t even a choice. Bob Dole, the Senate Republican leader, had supported the bill on its first pass through the chamber, back in the formative weeks of Clinton’s presidency, when even a tough nut like Dole assumed his party would have to find at least some common ground with the White House. That was then. Now, Dole announced he hadn’t been paying close enough attention to the bill the first time around, that “the more you look at it, the more questions that are raised.” He wasn’t prepared to move forward on it, and neither was the rest of his party. The filibuster held, the bill died, and Democrats fumed at what they called an abuse of a legislative tool that was supposed to be reserved for rare circumstances. “I think the strategy is quite clear,” George Mitchell, the top Senate Democrat, said. “They don’t want anything to pass.” Gingrich retorted: “It’s not obstructionist. It’s interpreting the will of the American people.”

It had gone down this way more than two dozen times now since Clinton’s inauguration, and what really mystified Democrats was just how popular the Republican strategy seemed to be. If there was a political downside to choosing combat over cooperation, Republicans had yet to encounter it. All of the evidence—Clinton’s dismal poll numbers, the swirl of scandal around him, the media’s critical coverage—told them they’d made the right call. This was a fluke president who’d be gone at the end of his term, and maybe even sooner.

It was getting to Democrats, too. In those exhilarating weeks between Clinton’s victory and inauguration, they’d talked of unleashing a legislative hurricane, entrusted at long last with full control of Washington. Clinton had made cultivating the old bulls of Capitol Hill a priority, and they’d eagerly bought in. “I put my hands on his shoulders,” boasted Dan Rostenkowski, a product of Chicago’s old Daley machine who ruled the House Ways and Means Committee, “and I said, ‘Bill, I’m going to be your quarterback and you’re my six-hundred-pound gorilla of a fullback moving these bills.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.