August has a tendency to cause problems for whatever party happens to control Congress. You might not remember the summer of 1995. The freshman class of the Gingrich Revolution was busy stripping funding out of the federal budget with a meat cleaver. They had eliminated funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nationial Endowment for the Humanities. They cut funding for overseas family planning programs. They even slashed the mink subsidy. Sometimes at odds even with Gingrich, the Freshmen were on a roll. They had a mission to balance the budget by 2002, and they were willing to attack spending even for their own constituencies. Silly Freshmen. They would soon learn better.
Their momentum stalled during the August recess, when members were sent back to their districts with the mission of explaining the upcoming plan to slash $270 billion from Medicare spending. The GOP pollsters told the members to talk about “preserving and protecting Medicare,’ and they called the bill the ‘Medicare Preservation Act.’ They were armed with talking points, but they had a problem. There was no actual bill because it had not been marked up yet. That was actually part of their strategy.
The Republicans wanted to hold back on their plan as long as possible so it couldn’t be picked to death. But their strategy backfired. They were perceived as wanting to keep everyone in the dark about their plan, as if they were ashamed of it, and to ram it through without the benefit of adequate hearings and review. – from The Freshmen: What Happened to the Gingrich Revolution?, by Linda Killian. p.164, Westview Press, 1998.
This next part might sound familiar.
[In September] the Republicans held dozens of hearings and invited all of the interest groups- doctors, hospitals, seniors- to testify and to help write the legislation. The one group they kept out of the room was the Democrats. The Republicans wanted to completely transform a program that affected nearly 40 million people in this country, and they thought they could do it without Democratic input. That obviously didn’t sit well with the Democrats, especially those who had been actively involved in health policy in the past.
The Democrats were obviously frustrated with being in the minority and having so little to say in what was going on. On Wednesday, September 20, tempers erupted during a closed-door meeting of the Ways and Means Committee. Senior Democrat Sam Gibbons stormed out of the meeting after calling the Republicans “a bunch of fascists” for refusing to allow him to speak and scheduling only one hearing on their Medicare plan, which they still had not released to the Democrats…Wadding up a piece of paper and throwing it on the table, he said, “You’re a bunch of dictators, that’s all you are. I had to fight you guys 50 years ago” as a paratrooper in World War II. -ibid. p.164
Meanwhile, Clinton’s White House was not inactive. Powered by the polling of Dick Morris, the administration launched a scathing August and September ad campaign that the Republicans would dub “Medi-scare.” It was boldly cynical, in that it failed to acknowledge the reality of the crisis in Medicare funding. But it worked. The Republicans were deluged by angry senior citizens in their townhall meetings throughout August. A bunch of Republicans got very nervous. In the end, the Medicare cuts passed the House on a party-line vote, and got no further. Public opinion turned against the Gingrich Revolution, setting the Republicans up to take the blame when the government shut down at the end of the year.
I think the parallels between then and now should be pretty obvious. We obviously have the benefit of a Democratic president and larger congressional majorities. We also have been bending over backwards to try to get Republicans involved in writing this legislation. There is no prospect of a government shutdown this winter. But there are lessons to be learned from the Republicans’ experience. What do you think they are?
