Republicans In Congress

DRAFT DODGER, patriot; Bill Clinton, Bob Dole.Match them up; and be mindful -- this is an environmental column.This train of thought proceeds from a recent talk by Wayne Gilchrest, the Republican and environmentalist who represents me in Congress.It was the weakest performance I've heard Rep. Gilchrest give. Maybe the problem was the topic set forth by Salisbury State University: "Conservatism and Environmentalism -- The Apparent Conflict."Until recently there's been no fundamental conflict.

Ayatollahs seem to just appoint themselves and then start enforcing their own brand of orthodoxy. Grover Norquist has been doing that in the Republican Party for years. Mr. Norquist has never been elected to anything. Nobody ever said he should be in charge of the GOP's true religion (although he claims President Ronald Reagan urged him to found his lobbying group, Americans for Tax Reform). But he certainly has been the Republicans' key political theologian who made opposition to tax increases the party's central tenet for more than 25 years.

UNITED NATIONS Secretary-General Kofi Annan's plan to reduce his secretariat's staffing by 1,000 from 10,000, trim $123 million from a two-year budget and merge three economic development agencies into one, sounds like what Republicans in Congress demand.But they aren't so sure. They want real paring and not just accounting games. Skeptical reactions from rank and file are a holding pattern while the congressional leadership negotiates with the administration.It is becoming clear that President Clinton's second-term diplomatic team consists of ambassadors to Congress.

`Stop Snitching 2' sends wrong signals Thanks to The Sun for publishing the enlightening, if disturbing, article on Stop Snitching impresario Rodney Bethea ("Thug life - the sequel," Dec. 23), who is photographed in front of an abandoned, boarded-up rowhouse that symbolizes the promise of his empire - Baltimore as a dilapidated ghost town. Unfortunately, I have yet to find an acceptable rationale for Mr. Bethea's actions. Although he promotes the stop snitching, pro-dealing ethic because, he says, "People are surviving the only way they know how," he fails to add the appropriate note that they are doing so by killing their brothers and sisters and their community.

WASHINGTON - Saying that Republicans in Congress were treating the projected federal budget surplus "as if they'd won it in the lottery," President Clinton defended yesterday his promise to veto the main tax cuts passed by the House and Senate and called for bipartisan cooperation in setting the nation's fiscal priorities. In his weekly radio address, taped in Japan - where he is meeting with the leaders of the big industrial nations - Clinton said Republicans were rushing toward spending all the projected surplus on tax cuts that would go primarily to the wealthy.

REMEMBER those widely publicized Senate hearings of citizens accusing the Internal Revenue Service of abuses and vendettas against them? They made for great fodder for gleeful Republicans, who choreographed the proceedings to fit their political objectives. But these alleged abuses never happened. That's the conclusion of a General Accounting Office report. Earlier studies also were unable to corroborate the charges loudly leveled at the nation's tax-collecting agency back in 1998. Sen. William V. Roth of Delaware had a field day bashing the IRS as Big Brother run amok.

When I attended the College Park campus of the University of Maryland from 1968 to1972, it was the height of the Vietnam War.As a Republican and supporter of Richard Nixon, I sometimes felt very lonely when we discussed politics. often. In fact, it was Nixon's strong stance in foreign affairs that attracted me to the Republican Party in the first place, along with the near-isolationist philosophy of the Democrats.Given that, you can imagine the slow burn I've been doing the past two months as many Republicans in Congress are starting to sound like George McGovern over the war in the Balkans.

WASHINGTON --Sen. John W. Warner and his wife were at the White House for a Memorial Day photo session with veterans when they received an unexpected invitation from President Bush. "Come on," the president said suddenly. "Let's go back to the Oval Office." What followed, said Warner, a Virginia Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was a rare 15 minutes alone with the president, no aides or staff in sight. Bush escorted the couple to a private garden and solicited the senator's views on Iraq.

IN A TIME of unprecedented prosperity, shouldn't this nation's lowest-paid workers get a slightly bigger sliver of the financial pie? Republicans in Congress are doing their utmost to delay that from happening. They have tied a bill raising the minimum wage to a tax-cut plan they know President Clinton will veto. That's cynical, uncaring, political game-playing. If the GOP and presidential candidate George W. Bush want to position themselves as friends of the American worker, they had better get serious about raising the minimum wage when Congress returns next month.

President Clinton has emerged from the federal budget standoff with his highest public ratings in nearly two years, while House Republicans, particularly Speaker Newt Gingrich, have lost much of the goodwill they enjoyed after their sweep of Congress last year, the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll shows.Virtually every finding showed striking evidence of renewed political strength for the president: Mr. Clinton's job approval level has broken 50 percent for the first time in the Times' polling since February 1994.

WASHINGTON --Sen. John W. Warner and his wife were at the White House for a Memorial Day photo session with veterans when they received an unexpected invitation from President Bush. "Come on," the president said suddenly. "Let's go back to the Oval Office." What followed, said Warner, a Virginia Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was a rare 15 minutes alone with the president, no aides or staff in sight. Bush escorted the couple to a private garden and solicited the senator's views on Iraq.

WASHINGTON -- A number of Republicans, including me, lately have been asking ourselves: What has become of our party and why has it lost its moral and ideological compass? A more telling question and statement may have been made by my South American wife with regard to certain Republican members of Congress who support guest-worker legislation for millions of illegal aliens. As a newly minted and very proud U.S. citizen, she said, "What's wrong with those people? They are spitting in my face and the face of every immigrant who came into this country legally, paid our dues, did all of our paperwork and played by the rules.

MEMPHIS -- The race for the White House, an unusually long and crowded one, unofficially started here yesterday as a flock of Republicans began auditioning before influential party activists who will help choose the successor to President Bush. With home-field advantage, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist placed first in an informal poll of 2008 presidential hopefuls at a Republican conference. The two-term Tennessee senator received 526 first-place votes, or 36.9 percent, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference's "straw poll" sponsored by Hotline, a political digest.

Along the Gulf Coast, many evacuees hit by Katrina and Rita are still living in shelters, waiting for the temporary housing that President Bush promised by Saturday. Despite Mr. Bush's continued displays of concern - including a nationally televised moment this week helping volunteers build a home for a Louisiana family displaced by Katrina - there is still an enormous disconnect between what's needed in the storm-devastated Gulf areas and what's happening in Washington, where Republicans in Congress want to ax programs for low-income people while fiercely guarding tax cuts for the rich.

WASHINGTON - Republicans in Congress started searching yesterday for ways to achieve President Bush's overall deficit-reduction targets without slaying such political sacred cows as farm subsidies, Amtrak and aid to states. Many of the proposals in Bush's $2.57 trillion spending plan drew fire not only from Democrats but from members of his party who are reluctant to cut programs because they - unlike Bush - will face re-election in 2006 and beyond. Concern about persistent budget deficits, as well as resistance to deep spending cuts, could make it harder for Bush to achieve other domestic priorities, such as making his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent.

As part of an advertising blitz aimed at wrestling Florida away from President Bush in the recent election, environmentalists raised billboards in the hurricane-thrashed state. "Global warming equals worse hurricanes. George Bush just doesn't get it," read the signs, which showed a picture of a massive cloud system whirling toward Florida's coast. That attack on Bush's environmental record and others not only failed to swing the election, but some Republicans think they backfired - with alarmist rhetoric convincing voters that some liberals were prone to blame the president for everything, even bad weather.

WASHINGTON -- A number of Republicans, including me, lately have been asking ourselves: What has become of our party and why has it lost its moral and ideological compass? A more telling question and statement may have been made by my South American wife with regard to certain Republican members of Congress who support guest-worker legislation for millions of illegal aliens. As a newly minted and very proud U.S. citizen, she said, "What's wrong with those people? They are spitting in my face and the face of every immigrant who came into this country legally, paid our dues, did all of our paperwork and played by the rules.

WASHINGTON -- David Wilhelm, the 36-year-old Chicagoan who was Bill Clinton's campaign manager last year and is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, says that after six months on the job, he has learned something about the Republicans in Congress: They play hardball.That this should have come as any surprise to a man who saw his candidate pilloried with GOP attacks on his character last fall is a surprise in itself. One of the hallmarks of the Clinton campaign was its mastery of hitting back when hit, with a special "rapid response" unit in Little Rock that fielded Republican barbs on the short hop and fired back within a news cycle.

WASHINGTON - In a significant shift, leading Republicans in Congress are seeking to overhaul the way the federal government distributes anti-terrorism aid, with an eye toward establishing a system that gives more money to New York City and other localities considered at higher risk of terrorist attack. The changes being contemplated seek to address mounting criticism that members of Congress have been so intent on grabbing shares of security money for their own districts that not enough is left for cities where the threat is believed to be greatest.

It is just before 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning on a deserted field in Northwest Washington. Nearby homes have iron bars on their windows, trash swirls around an empty, overgrown parking lot - an unlikely venue for a congressional power powwow. But, one by one, clad in T-shirts and sweat pants, sleepy Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives gather. The goal: Figure out how to beat the Republicans. Not in a coming floor vote or election, but in the annual congressional baseball game.