Constitutional Speed Bumps Ahead for GOP Juggernaut : Politics: As Gingrich musters his troops for assault on status quo, much of the impact will be absorbed by a structure designed to change slowly.

By MELISSA HEALY

Jan. 1, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday, as Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) calls the House in the 104th Congress to order, he will look off to his left and see arrayed before him columns of freshly minted Republican troops, disciplined, determined and poised to make rapid and sweeping changes in America’s political and cultural landscape.

In what Gingrich hopes will be a 100-day legislative blitzkrieg, the GOP plans not only to cut taxes, revamp welfare and reduce regulation, but to overhaul government itself.

That is the battle plan. But as one of America’s best-loved modern generals, Colin L. Powell, said in the wake of the Persian Gulf War: “No battle plan survives contact with enemy.”

The U.S. government, balanced finely on three pillars, has withstood the determined march of many revolutionaries before.

The newly ascendant Republicans, historians agree, are certain to make a historic mark on Congress and on the laws it passes. But just as certainly, much of the lawmakers’ energies will be absorbed by a governmental structure designed to change slowly and to withstand repeated legislative batterings along the way.

“You can be in the biggest hurry in the world, but we have a government that says: ‘Calm down, slow down, let’s think about this,’ ” said Joel Silbey, professor of history at Cornell University. “Don’t be taken in by the energy of this Congress. . . . This juggernaut is going to encounter speed bumps.”

Some of those speed bumps were put in place by the drafters of the Constitution, and some have been carved into place by 206 years of parliamentary operations. Ironically, other impediments that will limit Congress’ ability to act at will are being put in place by Gingrich--the very man who is so intent on dominating policy-making for the next two years.

Undaunted, Gingrich and his allies have done more than lay down a challenge to President Clinton’s policies: Symbolically, said Yale University’s David Mayhew, they have challenged the power of the presidency itself. In their “contract with America,” Republican lawmakers have appropriated the concept of an agenda for the first 100 days of office--a political device that began with President Theodore Roosevelt and reached its romantic apotheosis with the John F. Kennedy Administration.

“He’s stealing a script from presidents . . . and that’s the first time that’s ever been done,” said Mayhew, a political scientist and author of “Divided We Govern.” “For a congressional party to do that is a new thing.”

Few historians doubt that the coming two years will be a period of great strength on Capitol Hill. But stealing the march from the White House will not be easy.

Even a President reeling from sagging approval ratings and a trouncing at the polls has several powerful weapons in his bid to dominate the policy-making process.

The numerical and analytical superiority of the presidency is overwhelming when it comes to staff power; the office has a potent defense against unwanted legislation in the presidential veto; and however determined Gingrich may be to seize the legislative initiative, that is a prerogative that has largely devolved to the President in the past century

Not since the Whig Party thrived in Congress in the early 1800s has the notion of a weak presidency won widespread support. Dedicated to the legislature’s preeminence over the executive branch, the Whigs at the height of their influence put forward the hot-tempered Henry Clay, a congressman from Kentucky, as their leader.

Elected Speaker as a freshman, Clay and his congressional “war hawks” pushed the United States into the War of 1812 over President James Madison’s objections. In the face of opposition from President James Monroe eight years later, Clay helped engineer the Missouri Compromise--which maintained the balance between the slave states and free states within the Union.

But in 1829, Andrew Jackson, who later became known as “King Andrew” for his disregard of congressional sentiment, was elected President. The balance of power between Congress and the President shifted suddenly in the direction of the White House, and it has fitfully but steadily moved in that direction since.

Indeed, the strengths of the presidency have allowed even the most weakened presidents to fend off congressional nemeses. Just ask the ghost of Harry S. Truman.

Mayhew likened the 104th Congress to the 80th Congress, which went Republican during midterm elections and for the next two years made life miserable for the beleaguered Democratic President. Dismissed by Truman as the “do-nothing Congress” because of its resistance to his legislative program, the 80th Congress in fact had ambitious plans of its own.

Those included some familiar themes in this year’s political wrangle, including a tax cut, a term limit for presidents and a bill that would force strikers back to work in certain circumstances. And they came at a time when Truman’s approval rating was even lower than Clinton’s 38% support.

Truman vetoed the tax bill, which first passed in 1947, three times before Congress finally overrode it almost a year later. The presidential term limit--a bid to prevent a repeat of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s three-term presidency--became the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, but only after it got through 38 state legislatures--a process that took almost four years.

And after Truman’s political travails and all the Republicans’ apparent triumphs, it was the President who emerged the victor in the 1948 elections. Truman was reelected, and the Republicans who had hounded him lost control of the Congress. Among those swept out of office in the election was Rep. Harold Knutson (R-Minn.), the champion of the tax-reduction bill and Truman’s arch-nemesis in the 80th Congress.

The judiciary can also generate significant speed bumps along the road to legislative victory. By questioning the constitutionality of some elements of the “contract with America”--such as term limits and a balanced-budget amendment--the courts can force Republicans to take the long way around, getting two-thirds majorities in each chamber and seeking the approval of 38 state legislatures for an amendment to the Constitution. That is certain to compound the resistance their proposals will meet along the way.

And then there is Congress itself, divided into two chambers with distinct rules and differing traditions. Even with its tightly knit cluster of Gingrich loyalists, Congress is, as ever, a collection of independent actors, divided into parties that command no more than a loose hold on their members.

A legislature made up of many, wrote Alexander Hamilton in “The Federalist,” is “best adapted to deliberation and wisdom, and best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people.” In the legislature envisioned by his fellow Founding Fathers, he continued, “promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit. The differences of opinion, though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority.”

It is Hamilton’s ideal that could pose the mightiest threat to Republicans bent on fomenting a new conservative revolution. In plotting his legislative blitzkrieg, Gingrich must recognize that the Senate could be his Russian winter, the glacial reality that has chilled many an onslaught in its tracks.

And Gingrich, who has sought to pave the way by consolidating power in his own office, must also beware of his own troops. He would do well, said James L. Sundquist, author of “The Decline and Resurgence of Congress,” to heed the lesson of a much different revolution on Capitol Hill--that of 1910. In March of that year, lawmakers stopped chafing under a succession of House speakers whose powers--over committee assignments, legislative favors and access to the floor--had become so concentrated they became known as “czars.”

In what became known as the “Revolution of 1910,” lawmakers rose up against what they considered to be the growing tyranny of the Speaker’s office and ousted Republican Speaker Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois. “No member ought to be compelled to go to another man, his equal and no more, a representative of a constituency no whit superior to his own, and ask for the poor privilege of calling his measure to the attention of the House,” groused Republican insurgent William P. Hepburn of Iowa, who helped dethrone Cannon.

“Newt is re-creating those very, very strong institutional aspects of the speakership, much as it was in 1900,” said former Rep. Dick Cheney, an admirer of Gingrich who co-authored a study of Congress titled “Kings of the Hill.” “Nobody has ever given a lot of thought--until Newt--to how to make the House an effective functioning part of government. . . . The place needs a good cathartic in order to be renewed.”

In the stately Senate as well, Republican leaders are readying for a brisker pace in step with the House, and not all are comfortable with the change. The Senate’s No. 2 man, Majority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.), has proposed to foster greater cohesion and discipline on the part of Senate Republicans by instituting a new system of “whips” to help bring lawmakers in line behind key legislation.

Indeed, Lott may be helped by one Democratic lawmaker’s bid to place stiff new limits on the filibuster, a venerable Senate institution that allows a single senator to continue debate on a bill until three-fifths of the Senate can agree to cut it off. In the most recent Congress, senators threatened filibusters and succeeded in thwarting consideration of a number of bills that would have won a majority on the floor had they been able to come to a vote.

Most Democrats, as well as the Senate’s bloc of moderate Republicans, are expected to resist efforts to make the Senate run much more efficiently. And they appear to have an ally in incoming Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, who has said he would oppose limits on “minority rights” in the Senate.

In the end, some analysts observed that the Republicans’ revolutionary ardor may be blunted most dramatically when congressional conservatives discover that many of their own proposals would tip the balance of institutional power even further toward the President. As Republicans institute congressional term limits, cut congressional staffs and draw power from committees in order to consolidate it in the Speaker’s office, they will be turning back some of the very developments that have boosted congressional clout in the past 20 years.

“There’s kind of a 19th-Century flavor to the government they envision, and they will come to realize that Congress has a lesser place as a constant creator of spending and regulatory programs in such a government,” Mayhew said. “It’s kind of an irony.”

Such concerns, in the end, could turn Gingrich’s planned legislative blitzkrieg into a turmoil on a slightly lesser scale than promised. For while the U.S. government has withstood the bluster of revolutionaries before, it has found smaller skirmishes rather refreshing. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison in 1787, “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”