By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources
Yesterday was quite a day in Washington. Congress and the White House came to an agreement about the $500 Billion Omnibus Budget bill and Alan Greenspan reduced interest rates for a second time in a matter of days.
At a news conference, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said the budget deal included "somewhere over $9 billion for defense and intelligence" operations. "We also blocked some really bad practices, like needle exchanges for drug addicts," he added. "We blocked efforts by the president to raise taxes and government fees by $130 billion, and we all blocked a number of other spending and entitlement programs that they were pushing for." In addition, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said the bill included "the strongest anti-drug" legislation ever enacted. Republicans had made that a key election-year issue.
The massive budget agreement, hammered out in committee meetings with the White House, is not actually written yet and, when drafted, is expected to run thousands of pages. But members of Congress will not have time to read it before being called to vote by the end of the week. "There are people who won't know everything that's in this bill a year from now," said Rep. Mike Parker, R-Miss., who said he was undecided on how to vote. Beneath the public proclamations of victory, there was more initial grumbling from Republicans than Democrats.
To a very large degree, the budget bill was a victory for the growing conservatism in America which is increasingly rejecting Big Government in Washington as the solution for every problem, and a defeat for most of Clinton's pet programs. However, as usual, the right leaning Republicans are complaining about defeat and the left leaning Democrats are claiming victories over issues where they actually were defeated. This enables liberal Democrats to claim responsibility for programs the public likes, while getting re-elected in the hope of rekindling the pot under Big Government spending.
Rep. David McIntosh, R-Ind., head of a group of conservatives, said he was unhappy about $20 billion in new spending. "Twenty billion dollars coming out of the surplus, rather than going to tax cuts for the American family, is a terrible, terrible provision in that bill and something that I will have great difficulty ever saying I voted for, let alone supported," he said.
In this election year, as I pointed out yesterday, both Republicans and Democrats see education as the issue the public is most concerned about. And, as I thought, the Democrats are claiming "victory" because the bill contains $1.1 billion for education, including money for either 30,000 or 100,000 teachers, depending on whose account you read.
Lest the general public believe this $1.1 billion will make any impact on the public schools of the nation, let me point out that in the State of California alone there are already 22,000 uncredentialed teaching teaching school - because teachers with credentials cannot be found. Also, up to 55% of the teachers in math and science in California Public schools don't even have a minor in their subjects. And, on top of that, 250,000 new teachers will be needed in the next decade in California to take care of the expected 18 million increase in the State's population. Also, while the $1.1 billion for education may look like a lot of money to people in, say, Wyoming, in California that is less than half the amount the Democrat Candidate for Governor, Gray Davis, is demanding just for new textbooks for California schools.
Sadly, the public schools of California, which already spend 55% of California's tax revenues, rank 50th in education in the nation, provides such poor education that it is unlikely it can find a quarter of a million new teachers from its own ranks to fill the public school slots.
These statistics, of course, will only get worse if the same failing philosophy of education is pushed from Washington bureaucrats that have caused the current failures. But, there is hope. The hope is that, in reality, the $1.1 billion for education will not be spent by Washington Bureaucrats -because, actually, the Republicans won on this issue. It will go directly to the states and it will bypass the federal Department of Education. That is actually a great victory for the States, although the $1.1 billion is a drop in the bucket when compared with the billions spent on Education nationwide.
On other issues, the Democrats bragged about finally getting an $18 billion line of credit for the International Monetary Fund to help combat global economic problems. However, the Republicans won "the most sweeping reforms in the agency's history" according to Sen. Lott by requiring the IMF to tighten up its loan practices and agency operations..
And, again, money appropriated for the United Nations is only sufficient to keep US voting rights in the General Assembly but money that Kofi Anan was depending on, because Clinton promised it, will not be available to the UN unless President Clinton accepts antiabortion restrictions that he opposes, both congressional and administration sources said yesterday.
Congress's year-end budget deal included $475 million to start paying off back U.S. dues to the U.N. But the funding was conditioned on Clinton's signing a separate authorization bill that includes a provision barring U.S. aid to international family planning groups that lobby countries to liberalize their abortion laws. Clinton has said he would veto the authorization bill if it contained the abortion restrictions.
Although details were not yet available late yesterday, sources said the budget measure, through a separate account covering contributions to international organizations, includes more than enough to pay the roughly $200 million that would be required by the end of the year as a minimum payment to keep the United States from losing its voting rights in the General Assembly. There is $39 million to spare, they said. The U.N. calculates total U.S. debts for both dues and peacekeeping operations at $1.6 billion. Disputing the U.N. figures, especially for peacekeeping obligations, Congress has calculated the debt at less than $1 billion.
A spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee said it had received assurances from the State Department that U.S. voting rights would not be affected by payment or nonpayment of previous debts. "We won't lose our voting rights but we won't pay any arrearages" unless Clinton agrees to sign the other legislation that includes the abortion restrictions, said a senior Senate Republican staff member, the Washington Post reported today.
This argument has been going on for over a year. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) and other GOP conservatives are determined to get President Reagan's "Mexico City" language back into existence to avoid US Taxpayer funding of foreign abortions.
Last year, funding for both the U.N. and the International Monetary Fund was held up in the waning hours of the congressional session because Clinton rejected the GOP abortion provisions. Earlier this year, Congress approved legislation that linked the restrictions to payments to the U.N., combining the provisions into a broader bill that reauthorized State Department programs and reorganization of the department.
Clinton's commitment to abortion on demand, and abortion as a means of population control prompts him to veto any legislation that contains abortion curbs. Republicans, in a highly unusual move, held up transmission of the State Department bill to the White House for months in hopes that Clinton would change his mind. A meeting called by House leaders to find a compromise ended in an angry exchange.
Yesterday, Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said he and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) will now send the State Department measure to Clinton and expressed hope that he would sign it. Democrats said Clinton's veto threat still stands.
While the Democrats are putting on a good show in claiming "victory," and are being helped in their PR effort by disgruntled doctrinaire conservatives who simply don't have the votes for their position as yet, the facts don't support the picture being portrayed by the Washington Post and other dominant media outlets.
In a statement following the announcement of "agreement" on the budget, Clinton said, "I also want to make it clear that none of this could have been done, in my view, not a bit of it, if we hadn't had a strong, united front from the members of our party in both Houses, led by Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, who believe passionately in what we were fighting for the American people."
That sure sounds like the president not only has agreed to the Republican program, but, once again, plans to take credit for it because he knows it is going to pass. Yet, in the same statement he admitted that all his major pet programs had been left on the cutting room floor: "I wished that we had passed the school rehabilitation and construction proposal. We have to have school facilities so that we can have those smaller classes. And, yes, I wish we'd passed the patients' bill of rights and campaign finance reform and the tobacco reform legislation and the minimum wage. But we can now go out and have a great national debate about that."
He ended by saying, as if he was doing the leading, instead of Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott who shepherded the huge bill through the Congress, holding the line on spending by refusing to pass Clinton's mammoth spending program, "This is a very, very good day for America. And I thank all the people behind me for everything they did to bring it about. Thank you."
A reporter observed at the end of the statement, "Mr. President, you rattled off a list of many of your priorities which this Congress did not give you -- priorities from your State of the Union address. Why did you specifically decide to hold the line on the education issue, on the idea of more funding for education, et cetera? Did you think that would have the most resonance with the voters?"
Clinton said what you would expect him to say, "This 100,000 teachers -- this is truly historic. The United States -- this is the educational equivalent of what we did when we put 100,000 police on the street."
Of course, most of those "100,000 police on the streets" never actually materialized and the funding was only for a year for those that did materialize and then the local communities had to pick up the tab, and most of them didn't - but you peasants out there aren't supposed to know about that. You are supposed to believe that program, not the reforms instituted by people like the Republican mayor of New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was responsible for bringing down the crime rate.
And, with the usual beltway spin we have grown to expect from the Networks News and Washington Post, and the complaints of conservatives who failed to win EVERY battle, some are going to believe the good 'ole Clinton spin.
I think, however, that the number of people willing to believe the spin is dwindling. It was interesting that no one seemed to use the budget agreement as an excuse for the stock market surge yesterday. Everyone seemed quite convinced that Alan Greenspan was the hero of the day by reducing interest rates. Which leads me to suspect, again, that the President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, is becoming more and more irrelevant to the governing process.
In fact, the budget agreement may have been successfully completed ONLY because he was out at one or another of the 100 fund-raising events he's attended this year rather than being in Washington working on it.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com