GOP backs
down again

For a moment last week, it appeared a few congressional Republicans had remembered why they were sent to Washington.
First, there are President Clinton's strong approval ratings in the public opinion polls. Add to those the relentless badgering of left-wing activists in the East Coast media -- anxious to label any minor divergence from welfare-state orthodoxy as a sure sign the ruthless Republicans will soon be murdering orphans and oldsters in the streets -- and you have a recipe for paralysis among a party that, four years ago, swept to power on a dynamic (for Washington) platform of government cutbacks, lower taxes, and more freedom for Americans to conduct their private lives as they see fit.
For

a moment, recovery seemed at hand, as House Budget Committee chairman Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, issued a draft, $1.7 trillion 1999 federal budget that actually called for -- gasp! -- a 1 percent reduction in federal spending.
But Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich -- the one whom the Washington press corps keeps reviling as such a rabid slasher -- immediately dubbed the proposals "neither desirable nor attainable."
Faced with wailing and lamentations not just from Democrats, but from his own Speaker and other GOP "moderates," Rep. Kasich retreated on March 14, and withdrew his "radical" outline.
What were the radical measures proposed by Congressman Kasich? Did he propose eliminating the IRS and its income tax and replacing it with nothing at all -- allowing the federal government to eke out a living on excise taxes alone, as it successfully did for most of its first 125 years?
He did not ... although that is precisely the kind of bold proposal that

 
might successfully reposition the "middle ground" in the much-needed debate over federal expansion and usurpation.
Did Mr. Kasich propose shutting down the huge (and constitutionally unauthorized) bureaucracies at the federal departments of Education, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services?
Why, no. Although the nation would doubtless be better off without these counterproductive boondoggles, Republicans have learned the hard way that the ululating chorus of the Washington media will promptly join the Democrats in simpering that to touch a hair on the head of these agencies would render America's precious children homeless, diseased, and illiterate ... and probably condemn them to spend their lives laboring in sunless coal mines, to boot.
No, the only federal departments which Budget Chairman Kasich proposed to eliminate were the useless offices of Energy and Commerce.
And here I thought it was the Republicans who always wanted to subsidize industrialists, oil-shale miners, agribusiness conglomerates, and international glad-handers.
One would think Democrats -- always seeking to divert any talk of budget cuts into a discussion of "corporate welfare" -- would have

raced to embrace these minor and overdue prunings.
The Kasich proposals called for $100 billion in new savings over five years, mostly by reducing the rate of growth of domestic programs. A projected $6.6 billion would have been trimmed from food stamps; $4.8 billion would have been saved by allowing states to limit spending under Medicaid. A further $2.7 billion would have been snipped by eliminating "earned-income" payments to low-income workers without dependents.
The Kasich budget would have ended $6 billion in synthetic coal and shale oil tax credits, and eliminated the AmeriCorps salaried "volunteer" program (a Clinton favorite) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Kasich would also have rolled back the so-called income tax "marriage penalty."
President Clinton would likely have vetoed such measures, of course. But Rep. Kasich, a potential year-2000 presidential contender, touted the plan as a way for Republicans to draw sharp contrasts with the president next fall, when control of the House will again be at stake.
"Earlier this year, President Clinton called for increased spending, increased government and increased taxes -- something we all know the American people have rejected," read a