Friday, April 17, 1998

Republican 'skit' drawing to a close

WASHINGTON -- Several political developments, taken together, are closing the curtain on the skit that began with the 1994 congressional elections. Those elections, Republicans vowed, would alter national arguments by adding a new constitutional sensibility -- actually, an old one so neglected as to seem new. This sensibility would question the utility and propriety of many federal interventions in problems that are rightfully the province of other governments, or of no governments.

A 1995 Supreme Court decision mildly ratified this political turn. By a 5-4 vote the Court declared unconstitutional a federal law banning guns near schools. The Court held that the Constitution's enumeration of federal powers did not extend that far.

However, four dissenting justices endorsed the theory that the constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce empowers the federal government to do almost anything. And in 1996 the Republican-controlled Congress essentially adopted the dissenters' view by passing a faintly variant version of the overturned law (this time remembering to mention the commerce clause), notwithstanding the fact that many states have, and all states could have, such laws.

This was a popular gesture, and gesture is everything, constitutional sensibility nothing, in today's theatrical politics. Besides, Republicans have prospered by pretending crime is a federal responsibility.

Gesture politics explains the new Republican promise that the tax code will be scrapped and replaced by something unspecified in 2001. It won't. Republicans who have been unable to abolish any of the Cabinet departments (e.g., Energy, Education) and other agencies they had targeted are not going to erase the tax code, every complexity of which has a constituency.

This spring, congressional Republicans have "gone native" with gusto, passing the lavish highway bill. The bill's supporters easily defeated an attempt to eliminate a racial and sexual "set-aside" program indistinguishable from the one the Supreme Court invalidated in 1995.

Whether Congress will vote to coerce states into lowering the blood-alcohol standard of drunk driving will be determined entirely by the strength of competing pressure groups (e.g., safety advocates or the restaurant industry). It will not be influenced by the argument that such standards are the states' business.

The current onslaught against the tobacco industry flows from the cupidity of the political class and rests in four false premises: Industry mendacity has prevented people from knowing that smoking is dangerous; smokers cost society huge sums; advertising causes teen-agers to start smoking; once smokers start, quitting is extraordinarily difficult.

One function of conservatives in a democracy is to fight hysteria with facts, such as: Opinion surveys show people overestimate the dangers of smoking; because cigarettes are heavily taxed and often prevent people from collecting old-age benefits, society is a substantial financial gainer from smoking; the primary aim and effect of advertising is less to create young smokers (peer pressure and the desire to offend overbearing adults do that) than to compete against other brands for market share; there are about as many ex-smokers as smokers in America.

Conservatives so fear seeming insufficiently hostile to tobacco interests, they abandon the premise of a free society -- the competence and responsibility of the individual. Such timidity will haunt conservatives when their plans for partial privatization of Social Security draw objections on the ground that individuals cannot be trusted to make important choices.

Sen. Pat Moynihan proposes cutting the regressive payroll tax and allowing individuals the option of investing the proceeds in personal pension savings accounts -- in the market -- to build estates over a lifetime. Moynihan has drawn this rebuke from Henry Aaron, economist at the Brookings Institution:

"Most low earners prefer to spend their money now. People can already save in tax-sheltered accounts, but few do so. Social Security was designed to correct this myopia, forcing people to set aside funds to protect themselves."

The assumption of "myopia" among low earners, who supposedly cannot defer gratifications, is a close kin to the assumptions of incompetence and irresponsibility in the crusade to save smokers from themselves. Conservatives could begin to recover their lost bearings by speaking sense about tobacco.

However, their exuberant participation in the anti-tobacco mob indicates the curtain has closed. It was just a skit.

Washington Post Writers Group