WASHINGTON, March 29 (UPI) -- The Senate is obstructing President George W. Bush's agenda again.
Conventional wisdom coming out of the stunning GOP victory in the November 2002 midterm elections was that Democrat obstructionism was dealt a severe blow and Bush would be able to push through key agenda items relatively unchanged. But in recent weeks two centerpieces of Bush's domestic agenda were voted down in the Senate -- and not in cloture votes, but in straight up-or-down floor votes.
Democrats successfully passed an amendment to the budget resolution to block opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration last week. Then, even more surprisingly, they were able to pass an amendment to slash the size of Bush's economic growth and jobs package in half.
In each case, the votes came down to a few Republicans who broke with party discipline. Oil drilling in the ANWR has been a hotly contested issue for decades, with the battle lines drawn largely between supporters of economic growth and job creation -- including oil companies, labor unions and Alaskan residents -- and environmentalist opponents of resource use.
With promised filibusters from several prominent Democrats, the budget bill, which cannot be filibustered, was a unique opportunity to allow for drilling, long identified as a top administration priority. The war with Iraq has heightened the national security arguments for boosting domestic energy production, and the White House made an all-out lobbying effort to pass the measure, deploying Vice President Dick Cheney personally and investing a large amount of political capital to convince key moderates.
Nonetheless, the measure failed by two votes, signaling that Bush's recent boost in approval ratings is not translating into legislative success in the domestic arena.
While ANWR drilling was a leading issue for Bush's domestic agenda, his tax cuts package is clearly the top domestic agenda item, which is why that legislative defeat was even more stinging for the White House. Three Republicans, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and George Voinovich of Ohio, sided with Democrats to slash the size of Bush's economic package by more than half.
The measure alleged to redirect $396 billion into a reserve fund to strengthen Social Security. That language is disingenuous at best --- the Social Security trust fund is a legal fiction. The program operates as an intergenerational transfer payment, with today's recipients receiving funds from the payroll taxes of today's workers.
What a "reserve fund" really means, ignoring accounting niceties -- and the economy does -- is deficit reduction. But the real budget deficit is an economic growth deficit, and restoring long-term budget surpluses requires a return to fast growth -- if the economy stays sluggish, large budget deficits are inevitable. The structural problems that the Social Security program faces are a result of a demographic crunch coming as baby boomers retire and the workforce is unable to support them -- those obligations will run into the tens of trillions.
A reserve fund, even if it were more than an accounting sleight of hand, would do nothing to address the impending crisis. Social Security reform must address structural problems, and the best way to accomplish that would be for Bush to revive his personal accounts plan.
Bush should use this Senate vote as an opportunity to bring Social Security reform, and his personal accounts plan, back onto the national agenda. By criticizing the Senate measure as ineffective, he can advance two legislative priorities at once --- building the case for his full tax plan while also advancing personal accounts for Social Security.
Unfortunately, White House political advisors seem to have convinced Bush to be content to let the issue of Social Security reform wait until his second term.
But will Bush have a second term? Despite a near obsession with avoiding repeating his father's mistakes, these recent setbacks in domestic policy are looking like déjà vu.
If the Senate succeeds in eviscerating Bush's tax package, the economy is likely to lapse back into a slow recovery, rather than continuing the rapid upswing starting to appear before the beginning of the war in Iraq.
Slow growth would undercut Bush's strength on domestic policy and open the door for the Democratic opponent to nullify foreign policy issues and win a victory on the economy -- Clinton redux.
Bush can avoid this fate, but he needs to fight for his domestic agenda now. Having properly delegated most of the key war decisions with operations well under way, Bush needs to turn his personal focus to key domestic issues and spend political capital to win back key moderate voters on issues like ANWR drilling and the size of the economic growth package.
Despite setbacks in the Senate, these and other priorities are far from dead in the short term. Both of these measures can be added back to the budget resolution in the House-Senate conference committee, and would stand a chance of passage in the final bill.
For it to happen, Bush will need to pressure swing voters as well as make a persuasive public case about the need to take bold measures to restore economic prosperity. He needs to make it clear that on top economic issues he requires total party discipline in the Senate. The country's economic future and his own political future may well depend on it.
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(Phil Kerpen is the Woodhill research fellow at the Club for Growth in Washington, D.C., where he focuses primarily on fiscal policy analysis.)
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(Outside View commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers on subjects of global interest.)
