The 103rd Congress, dominated by Democrats in both chambers, started out in January 1993 with high hopes of a long and successful production, directed by the first Democratic president in 12 years. By the time the curtain closed in October 1994, however, Republicans had stolen the show, and Congress was being booed offstage by angry voters who, at least in the Congress's second year, saw little accomplished other than partisan bickering and political infighting. A special session late in the year that brought congressional approval of a new world trade pact did not alter the overall picture.
As members rushed home to campaign for the November 8 elections, much of what President Bill Clinton and the Democrats had hoped would be the legacy of the 103rd Congress lay in shambles — shattered by successful Republican opposition that was aided by presidential missteps and division among Democrats themselves. A major health care reform program, campaign-finance and lobbying reforms, and most of the environmental initiatives were among the casualties, despite earlier promises that a Democratic-controlled Congress working with a Democratic president would mean an end to legislative gridlock. There were concrete accomplishments in 1993, but there were embarrassing defeats as well. And the record for 1994 was slim. Even many of the victories — a $30 billion anticrime bill, several education bills, a measure to protect California deserts, and legislation making it a crime to block access to abortion clinics — barely made it through Congress.
In the November elections voters made it clear what they thought of Congress's performance. Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years and returned to power in the Senate after an eight-year hiatus. Among Democratic casualties were some powerful politicians, including House Speaker Tom Foley (D, Washington); Dan Rostenkowski (D, Illinois), who had stepped down as House Ways and Means Committee chairman earlier in the year, after being indicted on corruption charges; and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Jim Sasser (D, Tennessee). No Republican incumbent was defeated.
As a result of the midterm elections, Republicans picked up a total of 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. A day after the election Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama — a Democrat who frequently voted with Republicans — officially switched parties, bringing the GOP gain in the Senate to nine.
What Congress Did.
In an effort to combat violence at abortion clinics, Congress passed legislation in May making it a federal crime to use or threaten force to intimidate anyone seeking or performing an abortion. Violators of the law could face criminal penalties, as well as civil damages and restraining orders.
Responding to voters' concern over crime, Congress in August passed a $30.2 billion anticrime bill that, among other things, banned the manufacture, sale, and possession of 19 types of assault weapons, provided $8.8 billion in funds for hiring of new police officers, extended the death penalty to more than 50 federal crimes, and allotted $6.9 billion for programs aimed at crime prevention. Each house had passed its own version of an anticrime bill the previous year, and in July 1994, House and Senate negotiators had crafted a compromise between the two versions. The new bill included an assault weapons ban but dropped a provision that would have allowed use of sentencing statistics to challenge death sentences as racially discriminatory. Anti-gun-control Democrats joined Republicans in an unsuccessful effort to block the revised bill in the House; in the Senate, supporters mustered the necessary votes to cut off debate after a few days and get the measure passed there as well, by late August.
Congress also approved legislation that would eliminate barriers to interstate banking. The nation's largest banks had for years been lobbying to create nationwide branch networks. Supporters of the legislation said the change would streamline the banking system and make it more profitable. Opponents, led by consumer groups and smaller banks, said the move would result in the concentration of the banking industry in too few hands.
In its last act before preelection adjournment Congress passed a bill to protect millions of acres of California desert. The action was the most comprehensive U.S. land conservation measure since 1980 and marked the end of an eight-year battle. Under the bill, whose passage was spearheaded by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, California), land from the Sierra Nevada to the U.S.-Mexico border was to be protected as wilderness, and national monument areas in Death Valley and at Joshua Tree were to become national parks. The Mojave area was designated as a national preserve — a step below national park status — as a concession to hunters. A filibuster on the bill was cut short, partly because of the bipartisan appeal of protecting the large area from developers and partly because of lawmakers' desire to return to their home states to campaign.
In education, Congress passed several initiatives, including renewal of a $12.4 billion elementary and secondary aid program to help the nation's poorest children, curb school violence, and bring more technology to classrooms. Other measures funded a job skills program to help students not planning to attend college become more employable, set national education goals for all students and schools, expanded the Head Start program to disadvantaged preschoolers under the age of three, and overhauled the college student loan program.
Members of Congress were focusing on the White-water investigation — a look into allegations of financial wrongdoing related to an Arkansas resort development in which the Clintons had invested — when the legislators reinstated the independent counsel law, some 18 months after the 1978 statute had expired. The law provides for the appointment of prosecutors outside the Justice Department to investigate alleged misconduct of high-ranking officials. Shortly after President Clinton signed the bill in late June, an independent prosecutor was appointed to investigate Whitewater allegations and another to examine charges against Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy involving gifts from a poultry business regulated by the Agriculture Department. As a result of the probe into his affairs, Espy, saying he had broken no laws or ethics rules, announced he would resign as of December 31.
Congress put the Federal Bureau of Investigation in charge of counterintelligence and authorized a broad review of intelligence agencies in the new era following the end of the cold war. The move came in the aftermath of the case of Aldrich H. Ames, a longtime Central Intelligence Agency officer who spied for the Soviet Union and Russia from 1985 until his arrest and conviction earlier in 1994. The FBI had complained that the CIA was slow to inform the bureau that Ames was suspected of espionage.
In an accomplishment unusual in recent decades, the appropriations bills for the new fiscal year were passed by Congress, and signed by the president, before the new fiscal year began on October 1.
Congress returned from election adjournment to a special lame-duck session in order to approve the international trade agreement reached in the so-called Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The GATT treaty lowered tariffs worldwide and covered for the first time such areas as intellectual property and agricultural commodities. It won congressional support across party lines, clearing the House of Representatives by a vote of 288-146 and the Senate by a 76-24 vote.
What Congress Did Not Do.
President Clinton's sweeping plan for restructuring the nation's health care system died in September, after Congress had spent a year considering it, along with a number of less complicated alternatives. The 1,342-page bill, a key element in the president's legislative program, had been formally presented to Congress in October 1993, following months of deliberation, often behind closed doors, by a task force headed by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The plan, criticized by some as too bureaucratic, called for basic benefits to be made available to all, paid partly by business and partly by the consumer (with government subsidies to help individuals and small companies pay). Premiums were to be collected by regional 'health alliances' that negotiate with networks of health care providers and offer a choice among them; a panel appointed by the president was to oversee the system, establish standards, and monitor quality of services. The Republicans and the health insurance industry strongly opposed the plan, while Democrats never settled differences among themselves. A bipartisan proposal to make incremental changes came too late in the game, and the measure was abandoned before any legislation reached the House or the Senate floor.
The Senate defeated a proposed constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to balance the budget each year unless three-fifths of both chambers approved lifting the requirement. The measure, which had also been defeated in 1992 and failed to get to the floor in 1993, faced better prospects in 1995, however, with Republicans dominating both chambers. In fact, House Republicans made it one of the top ten legislative priorities outlined in their Contract With America, a set of proposals they promised to introduce, or reintroduce, in Congress in 1995. (If the proposed constitutional amendment should pass Congress, it would then have to gain approval from three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures in order to go into effect.)
An attempt to change the way congressional campaigns are financed failed in the face of Republican opposition to public financing and Democratic differences over whether to limit contributions from political action committees. The bill — which would have set voluntary spending limits on congressional races, with public matching funds for those candidates who comply — died in the Senate in September, when Democrats failed to stop a Republican-led filibuster. Democrats may have contributed to the measure's downfall by waiting until the last minute to propose a compromise. This was the fourth consecutive Congress to witness the demise of a Democratic campaign finance bill.
Congress also failed to pass a bill that would have tightened financial disclosure requirements for lobbyists and barred them from providing meals, entertainment, and travel to members of Congress and their staffs. The measure died when the Senate could not get the votes to quell a Republican-led filibuster near the end of the session. Both the House and the Senate had originally passed lobbying disclosure and gift ban provisions by wide margins.
A comprehensive bill to reauthorize the nation's most important water pollution law never made it to the floor of either chamber; the measure had cleared a Senate committee but ran into trouble in the House Public Works and Transportation Committee. Controversy over federal restrictions on wetlands development continued to be the major stumbling block.
A bill that would have revised the nation's drinking water laws died when House and Senate negotiators failed to work out differences over several issues, including the health risks posed by certain contaminants in drinking water. One key proposal would have created a revolving loan fund to help state and local governments build and improve drinking water treatment plants.
Another environmental bill, to overhaul the nation's hazardous waste program, died in the final weeks of the congressional session, a victim of partisan politics and differences over issues such as insurance, taxes, and fair wages.
Senate Republicans, threatening a filibuster, stopped a bill that would have made it illegal for employers to permanently replace workers striking over wages and benefits.
An attempt to rewrite the country's telecommunication laws and permit competition between telephone and cable television companies got disconnected in September, as a result of insurmountable differences among rival industry groups and between Democrats and Republicans.
The 104th Congress.
In the weeks following the elections, members of each party in each chamber met to select leaders for the new Congress, which was to convene in early January 1995. Robert H. Michel, the Republican leader in the House in the 103rd Congress, was retiring; for speaker in the new GOP-controlled House, Republicans chose the fiery Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who had previously been the minority whip. Texans Dick Armey and Tom DeLay were selected as, respectively, House majority leader and majority whip, and John Boehner of Ohio became chair of the Republican caucus. House Democrats elected Richard Gephardt of Missouri as minority leader (he had served as majority leader under Speaker Foley). The two other top Democratic leadership positions went to David Bonior of Michigan (minority leader) and Vic Fazio of California (chair of the Democratic caucus).
In the upper chamber, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, minority leader in the 103rd Congress, was chosen as majority leader; for the post of his deputy, or majority whip, Republicans elected Trent Lott, a conservative from Mississippi. Democrats selected Thomas Daschle of South Dakota as Senate minority leader; chosen as his deputy was Wendell Ford of Kentucky, majority whip under the Democratic leader in the 103rd Congress, Senator George Mitchell of Maine, who retired in 1994.
The November election results meant that committees in both houses would have Republican majorities and new Republican chairs. House Republicans also announced plans to make sweeping changes — among other things, eliminating several committees and two dozen subcommittees, cutting hundreds of employees from the House payroll, limiting the tenure of committee chairs, eliminating funding for caucuses (interest groups for representatives — such as the Congressional Black Caucus), and banning most closed-door hearings. These changes, some of which many Democrats also supported, required approval by the full House in order to go into effect.
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