GOP’s Agenda Is Yet Another War Casualty

WASHINGTON — Looking for collateral damage from the war in Kosovo? Take a peek at the legislative landscape of the U.S. Congress.

The war has eclipsed major elements of the Republicans’ legislative agenda, threatening the party’s chances to rack up major domestic policy accomplishments before it faces voters next year.

Tax cuts. Social Security reform. Strict fiscal discipline. All those pillars of the GOP’s post-impeachment agenda are teetering in the political cross-fire of the war.

Kosovo has forced Congress, as well as President Clinton, to give priority to matters military. Republicans have been responding by sending other fiscal matters to the back burner. Exhibit A: A key House committee Thursday voted to more than double the administration’s $6-billion request for emergency war funding. The $12.9-billion bill approved by the Appropriations Committee includes money for military construction and a military pay raise.

But if Republicans stick with this course, the war will not simply distract attention from other GOP priorities, it may also undercut them. More spending for the Pentagon would leave less room to cut taxes, as even ardent tax cutters, such as House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), acknowledge.

Also, dipping into the budget surplus for a defense buildup would belie Republicans’ much-ballyhooed claim that they would not use these funds for anything but Social Security. And the war has made it harder than ever for either Clinton or the GOP to commit the energy and political capital needed to reform Social Security.

“The entire agenda has been transformed,” said Marshall Wittman, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The question is, what can they salvage now?”

Some Republicans welcome the new focus on defense and foreign policy because those traditionally are GOP strong suits. At a time when their signature issue of tax cuts does not seem to resonate in a booming economy, some Republicans calculate they will reap a richer political harvest by making military preparedness their marquee issue.

“One of the problems is that tax cuts are not the issue they once were,” said a top GOP strategist. “But defense is a dead-bang winner. It’s an issue we own outright. And now people care more about defense and foreign affairs than they do about Social Security.”

Not all Republicans are so eager to see the party’s priorities shift, and pressure is building in the Senate to avoid dipping as deeply into the surplus as House Republicans want to pay for a war many GOP lawmakers oppose.

“I hope we can avoid tapping Social Security to pay for the war,” said Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), one of several conservatives urging Senate leaders to provide no more than the $6 billion Clinton has requested for the war. “The more we spend on the war, the less we have to spend everywhere else.”

That includes the item that not so long ago was the cornerstone of the party’s congressional agenda: tax cuts.

“This has all the looks of becoming the incredible shrinking tax cut,” said Stephen Moore, an analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. “The tax cut has moved from being the highest priority fiscal item to the lowest, backstage to funding for Kosovo, defense spending, more domestic emergency spending.”

Clinton’s own domestic agenda is also threatened by the distractions of war. Similarly, congressional Democrats have been stymied in promoting their top goals: campaign finance reform and tougher regulation of health maintenance organizations.

But the political stakes appear higher for Republicans because their hold on Congress is tenuous.

Following Congress’ months-long preoccupation with Clinton’s impeachment, Republicans early this year were determined to improve their low public approval ratings and craft an agenda showing them to be more than the party that sought to oust the president.

Initially, the party opened the post-impeachment debate with bold tax-cut talk.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and other leaders touted the idea of a 10% across-the-board tax cut. But facing resistance from moderate Republicans, they later backpedaled in favor of a narrower, more targeted tax cut. By the time Congress passed its budget resolution in April, there was only a tiny tax cut proposed for the coming year, with big cuts postponed far into the future.

Even that modest tax cut could be scaled back or further delayed if Republicans go ahead with a big defense spending increase.

Or as the Cato Institute’s Moore put it: “Every extra dollar for cruise missiles, F-14s, [NATO] salaries and expenses . . . is one dollar less for cutting tax rates.”

A second pillar of the GOP congressional agenda has been shoring up Social Security, a strategy aimed in part at immunizing the party from Democratic attacks on the issue. Republicans built this spring’s budget resolution around the unprecedented principle of prohibiting Social Security revenues from being used for anything but retirement benefits and paying down the national debt.

The idea of putting Social Security in a “lock box” meant that lawmakers could not use any of the current budget surplus--money entirely attributable to overflows in the current Social Security fund--to increase spending or cut taxes.

But efforts to reposition the GOP on Social Security have been undercut in a variety of ways:

* Republican leaders had planned to tout their proposals during a two-day barnstorming of the Midwest in March but canceled it because of the Kosovo war.

* House Republicans are treating the funding for the war in Kosovo and their additional defense proposals as emergency spending, meaning it does not need to be offset by cuts in other programs as called for in the 1997 balanced-budget agreement. But that, in effect, means they are proposing to use money from the budget surplus generated by Social Security.

* Republicans have said they will not push aggressively to reform Social Security unless Clinton takes the lead with a plan of his own. The GOP head of the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday unveiled a proposal to turn Social Security into a system of individual accounts, with a certain amount of retirement benefits guaranteed by the government.

But other key party leaders see the plan as risky. “It would be far better politically if it never came up,” said a senior Republican aide.

The result of all this could be that Republicans will have little but rhetoric to show for themselves on Social Security.

“They wanted to put the Social Security surplus into a lock box, but now it looks like they are putting Social Security reform in the deep freeze,” said Wittman, of the Heritage Foundation. That leaves the one element of the GOP agenda that may get a big boost from the war: the commitment to increasing the Pentagon budget.