GOP House Agenda Will Test Unity of Party

WASHINGTON — House Republicans are yearning to put their ethics trauma behind them by rallying around a new legislative agenda. But the items at the top of their list could turn out to be big flops.

The first major issue that will come before the House when it returns from its recess in early February is congressional term limits, a proposed constitutional amendment that is sure to be voted down.

And passage of a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced federal budget, once expected to be the Republicans’ first big triumph of 1997, is suddenly in doubt.

The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee predicted Sunday that while a balanced-budget amendment should win Senate approval this year, it could get stalled in the House.

“I think that it’s within probably two or three votes either way” in the House, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“In the Senate we expect to win because we’ve got a more comfortable margin, but in the House it’s a tossup.”

Finally, the House will be forced to vote on funding for international family planning, a divisive issue expected to reignite conflict between the party’s antiabortion and abortion-rights wings.

The upshot? At a time when the party is still struggling to heal the wounds inflicted by House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s ethics lapses, its initial legislative agenda appears destined to open new ones: the GOP’s older generation versus its younger members, its social conservatives versus its moderates.

With the speaker visibly weakened and Republicans operating with a wafer-thin majority in the House, it may be harder for GOP leaders to bridge those divisions and bring wayward members into line.

“The leadership doesn’t have a lot of leverage on us,” said Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), leader of a rump group trying to extract concessions from GOP leaders on terms of a balanced-budget amendment.

Last week, the House voted to discipline Gingrich for giving false information to the House Ethics Committee and other rules violations. It was the first time in the history of the institution that a speaker has received a formal reprimand.

In the wake of the Gingrich sanctions, Republicans have been fretting not only about the damage done to the speaker’s image and clout, but also about the toll it has taken on the party’s unity and morale.

The House leadership has been preoccupied with the speaker’s defense for weeks. Some in the rank-and-file have openly questioned whether Gingrich should remain speaker; nine Republicans refused to vote for him for the post.

“It has kept us from getting focused on what our agenda is,” GOP pollster Eddie Mahe said of Gingrich’s ethics problems. “It creates conflict and controversy within a narrow majority, which can’t sustain much conflict and controversy. It has branded a number of members as almost traitors.”

To repair the political damage, Republicans are trying to switch gears and start focusing on legislative matters. To that end, top GOP lawmakers headed for the Virginia countryside after the ethics vote for a three-day leadership retreat to plot their legislative course.

But the No. 1 issue of 1997 was decided long ago, in a very different time and place: back in the heyday of the Republican revolution in Congress.

In early 1995, after the House failed to pass a constitutional amendment to impose congressional term limits, Gingrich promised that the measure would come back as the first vote of the 105th Congress.

It is an issue that splits the GOP, largely along generational lines. Many senior Republicans, including influential Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), have opposed term limits. But the idea is practically an article of faith among Republicans elected in the 1990s.

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Opposition to the idea remains strong. Some term-limit proponents have said they will be lucky to get as many votes for the proposed amendment this year as they did in 1995. Many Republican term-limit advocates were defeated in last fall’s elections, and remaining backers are waging a bitter battle among themselves and with lobbyists about whether to support a six-year or 12-year limit on congressional service.

“We’ll have to struggle to get any more than the 227 votes”--the number of House votes that the measure received two years ago, said Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), a leading advocate of the idea.

House Republican leaders are doing little to call attention to the term-limit measure, and their aides brush it off as an unpleasant obligation.

In contrast, they are treating the proposed balanced-budget constitutional amendment like a life preserver for Republicans foundering in the choppy waters of ethics scandals.

Returning from their retreat on Thursday, Gingrich and other GOP leaders staged a full-dress news conference to announce that they had scheduled a vote for Feb. 26 on the balanced-budget amendment.

Two years ago, the House passed the measure, 300 to 132, giving it 10 votes more than the two-thirds majority needed to pass a constitutional amendment. But the amendment failed in the Senate by one vote.

In the wake of the 1996 elections, proponents of the amendment were ebullient. With Republicans picking up two seats in the Senate, it looked like there would be enough votes to pass the amendment.

But now, its prospects appear questionable in the House.

The elections cut into the Republican margin of control, and House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) estimates that the balanced-budget amendment lost 20 supporters. Attention is focused on the 74 newly elected members, many of whom have not committed themselves on the budget amendment.

“This is going to be a very close vote,” Gingrich said. “The fact that we passed it last time by a 10-vote margin in the House and then lost it by one vote in the Senate is no predictor of what’ll happen this year.”

Compounding GOP problems, a group of backbenchers has been leaning on Republican leaders to include a provision that would prohibit the government from using the surplus in the Social Security trust fund in calculating whether revenues are in line with expenditures.

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Souder and Rep. Mark W. Neumann (R-Wis.) have urged their leaders to include the provision and, if they do not, have threatened to vote for a Democratic alternative expected to include Social Security protections. It is a more sensitive matter now than two years ago, Souder said, because Republicans were hit so hard in the 1996 elections by accusations that they were trying to cut federal Medicare benefits to those age 65 and older.

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said he does not think that the Republicans are in danger of losing votes over the Social Security issue but would work with Souder and Neumann to keep them on board.

“This is going to be tough to pass, unlike last year,” DeLay acknowledged.

Meanwhile, the House is expected to have its first face-off on a sensitive, abortion-related measure in February when lawmakers revisit a question about funding for international family planning. It is a holdover from a dispute last year, when antiabortion forces tried to block funding for international population-control groups that promote and perform abortions. Abortion-rights and family-planning advocates opposed those cuts.

Under a compromise worked out to get the year-end budget passed, Congress voted to reduce the program by 35% and block any spending until July 1. But it provided for a vote in February to reconsider the matter and allow money to be released March 1.

Abortion-related issues inevitably underscore divisions between the GOP’s social conservatives and moderates. For that reason, Gingrich imposed a moratorium on considering social issues until after the first 100 days of GOP power. Last year’s fight over population-control funding, which was largely between conservative Republicans in the House and GOP moderates in the Senate, was so hard-fought that it nearly derailed the government’s year-end budget legislation.

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Now, some Republicans are saying that they cannot count on Gingrich alone to bridge those divisions within the party.

“We can’t depend on leadership to force us to do things,” Souder said. “It’s going to force us at a member-to-member level to work through this stuff. It’s going to be messy.”