Not Our Finest Hour

Congress jets home after a slapdash and slapstick session

On one side was Majority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee, a believer in conciliation and consensus. On the other was a cadre of fervent right-wingers led by North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, a maverick ideologue and veteran obstructionist. Ostensibly the issue was the 5¢ gasoline tax. But after six postmidnight sessions and four filibusters, the bitter battle became one over party power and personal pride.

In the end, six days after the special lameduck session of the 97th Congress was supposed to adjourn, Baker finally regained a moment of control over the cantankerous Senate and the measure passed. With that the Senators fled for home, as well they might, leaving behind the near debacle that the special session of Congress had become.

Supporters of the bill that tied up the Senate for 13 days said that the legislation, which will raise the federal gasoline tax from 4¢ to 9¢ starting April 1, would create 320,000 new jobs, extend unemployment benefits, help repair the nation’s decaying highway and transit systems and cost the average motorist only $30 annually. It would also increase the maximum user fee for heavy trucks from $210 to $1,900 a year and permit the use of long double-trailer trucks on many state roads.

To Helms, the gas levy was a tax-and-spend heresy. Aided by his North Carolina colleague John East and two obscure Republican freshmen, Donald Nickles of Oklahoma and Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, Helms tried to talk the bill to death. The willful clique was able to delay a final roll call until Thursday, two days before Christmas, hoping that by then enough members would have gone home to prevent the Senate from mustering a quorum.

Baker retaliated by using a fleet of 11 military jets (each costing $742 an hour out of the Pentagon’s budget) to bring Senators back for the vote and ensure them a quick flight home when it was over. Even Barry Goldwater, who was in an Arizona hospital recuperating from open-heart surgery, returned to Washington. “The sky was dark with Air Force planes bringing back Senators, kicking and screaming,” Helms complained. Senators finally strangled the filibuster for good by an 81-to-5 vote, then passed the gas tax, 54 to 33. Baker, who had triumphed because of the reservoir of good will he had built up with both Democrats and Republicans, slipped back to his office to celebrate with a glass of champagne. He and Minority Leader Robert Byrd put in a joint call to the President to say that they had passed the gas tax, just as House Majority Leader Jim Wright and Minority Leader Robert Michel had done two days before.

The gas tax was not even part of the original agenda for the lameduck session, which was requested by President Reagan to prod Congress into passing the necessary appropriation bills for fiscal 1983, a period that began, of course, last October. The members bungled that task, the result being that 80% of the Government’s funding needs had to be lumped once again into a catch-all piece of legislation called a continuing resolution. They did better when it came to granting themselves a pay raise and grabbing pork-barrel goodies (see box). Said Oklahoma Democrat James Jones, chairman of the House Budget Committee: “This lameduck session was not our finest hour.”

Yet the special session was not an unmitigated disaster. The passage of a spending plan for the rest of fiscal 1983, even though it was done through a continuing resolution rather than the formal passage of appropriation bills, marked the first time in three years that Congress had provided a full year of funding for the Government before adjourning for Christmas. President Reagan, while emphasizing that he was still “deeply troubled by the budget-making process,” said of the lameduck session: “After taking all factors into account, I think this effort has been worthwhile.”

A showdown over the continuing resolution was averted at the last moment when a House-Senate conference committee agreed to jettison a “jobs bill” that both chambers had attached to the measure. The Democratic House had voted $5.4 billion for the program, and the Republican Senate had approved a $1.2 billion figure. But Reagan, with much justification, argued that both versions were motley collections of local pork-barrel projects masquerading as jobs programs. He threatened to veto the entire continuing resolution, an act that would have shut down much of the Federal government last week, unless the job amendments were scuttled.

When the congressional conferees met to work out a consensus on the continuing resolution, the “compromise” between the House’s $5.4 billion program and the Senate’s $1.2 billion program turned out to be a Reagan-pleasing goose egg. Republican Congressman Silvio Conte of Massachusetts put the matter bluntly to Democratic Congressman Jamie Whitten of Mississippi. Said Conte: “Christ, Jamie, why make us go through this? We’ll just get a veto and be right back here.” At a private conference that evening, the Democrats decided it was futile to provoke a confrontation that would close down the Government.

Members were particularly anxious to protect the pay raise they had given themselves for Christmas, which was likely to be lost if Reagan vetoed the continuing resolution. The 15% increase voted for House members, their first substantial raise in five years, was in fact long overdue. The main problem was one of timing, taking a pay increase when 12 million people are out of work. Said Congressman Leon Panetta of California: “It’s the cherry on top of the pie to end up with a continuing resolution that has no money for jobs but a pay increase for Congress.” The Senators sanctimoniously eschewed a salary hike (and thus will earn less than House members), but they opened the way for a flood of “honorariums” from special-interest groups by forbidding any limit on outside income for Senators. A $9,100 limit on outside earnings was due to go into effect next year and would have stopped the practice whereby some Senators reap more than $50,000 a year by giving speeches and making personal appearances.

Another significant decision in the continuing resolution was the deletion of $988 million for building the first five MX missiles. Reagan insisted when signing the spending bill that, under his interpretation of the wording, it permitted the Administration to build some of the new missiles by using funds earmarked for research and development. Said he: “The language of the conference report does enable us to keep to our schedule for initial deployment in 1986 once the Congress approves a permanent basing decision.” But Congress’s action seemed likely to cripple the homeless weapon. The lawmakers cut an additional $5 billion from the defense budget in a move that the White House did not publicly protest.

Congress also used the continuing resolution for some ill-advised meddling in foreign policy. One provision specifically renews a ban on any American-supported military activities designed to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The CIA has been arming bands of anti-Sandinista rebels based in Honduras. But the White House insists that it has been complying with this restriction and will continue to do so.

On the whole, however, the special session will be remembered more for what it did not do. Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, designed to give trade breaks to Latin American countries, was ignored in the last-minute shuffle. The failure to enact a new law governing bankruptcy courts has left that system in legal limbo. A worthwhile immigration bill painstakingly worked out by the Senate and Administration, which attempts to regulate better the influx of alien workers, died in the House. The expiring Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were hotly debated and amended, but Congress did not get around to a final vote on renewing them.

Above all, the raucous lameduck session forcefully illustrated the most significant problem Congress faces: the breakdown of its budget process. In 1974 Congress reformed the way it authorizes funds by instituting a system designed to force committees to reconcile their spending decisions with an overall budget resolution. Not since 1977, however, has Congress been able to complete the final stage in this unwieldy process, the passage of 13 formal appropriation bills. As a result, it must regularly consider a potpourri of programs all thrown into a catch-all continuing resolution with little time for detailed deliberation. Noted Missouri’s Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton of this session’s continuing resolution: “On foreign aid we spent 15 minutes.”

Another potentially debilitating problem for Congress was the breakdown in Republican unity. The acrimonious fight provoked by Helms left scars that will not heal quickly. “Right now, Jesse Helms couldn’t get unanimous consent to wish his grandmother happy birthday,” said Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon. During his filibuster, Helms was the recipient of one of the most scathing attacks in recent Senate history. It came from a member of his own party, the usually amiable Alan Simpson of Wyoming. Standing next to Helms, Simpson declared: “Seldom have I seen a more obdurate and obnoxious performance. I guess it is called hardball. In my neck of the woods we call it stickball. Children play it.”

Next week the 98th Congress, which will be more liberal and Democratic than the one that staggered offstage last week, will convene. With 84 new members, it will have to get organized all over again. Some time in January, Reagan will send it his budget plan for fiscal 1984, with projections of another huge deficit, this one exceeding $150 billion. The President will be confronted with growing skepticism about his economic nostrums. Members are not likely to take gracefully such naive proposals for confronting unemployment as the one Reagan tossed out at a press conference last week: that there would be more than enough jobs for the 12 million currently out of work if each of the nation’s 15 million businesses hired just one more worker. The President did not take into account the fact that three-quarters of these businesses are small owner-operated enterprises, most with receipts of less than $25,000 a year, that could not afford more employees, or use them. Taking a more realistic tack, Howard Baker has promised that the new Congress will take up a jobs measure similar to the one Reagan threatened to veto.

The efficient functioning of the incoming Congress will depend on the ability of moderate Senate Republicans, like Baker and Robert Dole of Kansas, to broker consensus policies acceptable to both Reagan and the House Democratic leadership. For this to work, Helms and his band of renegade Republicans must be controlled better than they were during the lameduck session. In addition, Reagan, who up to now has had great success in persuading Congress to do his bidding, must show that he also has the flexibility to work with the institution when it asserts more independence. Otherwise, the pendulum will swing from a Congress that once had blind faith in Reagan’s policies to one that is blindly determined to stop them. —By Walter Isaacson. Reported by Neil MacNeil and Evan Thomas/Washington