George Washington is the only president who didn’t blame the previous administration for his troubles.
—Author unknown
DESPITE THE CONTROVERSIAL DECISION THAT MADE GEORGE W. Bush the forty-third president, he came to the White House with his party controlling both the House and the Senate. This would be a blessing and a curse for the new president. The blessing was his party’s control of Congress, meant a conservative agenda might finally become a reality. The curse was that with his party controlling Congress and the White House, Republicans couldn’t blame Democrats if something went wrong.
George Bush had run for president describing himself as a “compassionate conservative.” Although not many people understood exactly what that meant, it sounded warm and fuzzy compared to the hard-edged reputation the Republicans gained during the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton. Running as a Washington outsider allowed Bush to distance himself from the growing polarization in Washington. Sensing the public’s weariness with partisanship, the Texas governor called for a return to civility and bipartisanship.
Despite his New England patrician roots, George W. Bush was a Texan at heart. He didn’t care much for Washington and its pretentiousness. He rarely entertained, went to bed early, and would escape 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as often as possible to his beloved sixteen-hundred acre ranch in Crawford, Texas. When he couldn’t go home, he made regular use of the Camp David presidential retreat. Bush’s inner circle was small. With the exception of Chief of Staff Andy Card, most had been with him in Texas.
Bush was loyal to a fault, and expected the same in return. Like most presidents, he was disdainful of the political press corps and hated leaks. The players in the Bush administration took the “no leak” policy to heart and were surprisingly successful in keeping internal discussions out of the media. But leaks are inevitable in Washington, especially when a large group has access to information.
His record as governor of Texas provided evidence that Bush could work with Democrats to pass legislation, and his first proposal to Congress, the “No Child Left Behind” education reform proposal, was an effort to achieve consensus. The White House developed the bill with two of the most liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller, a liberal House Democrat from California.
This attempt at bipartisanship did not sit well with the leadership of either party. Democratic leaders were still chafing from the 2000 election, and were none too pleased with Kennedy for giving the president a legitimacy they felt he did not deserve. Had it not been for Kennedy’s stature as the liberal lion of the Senate, these concerns might have been more public. Miller, like Kennedy, had been the Democratic go-to guy on education issues for nearly thirty years. But as is the case in so many convoluted Washington power games, there was another story behind the story of the education legislation. It was Miller’s Republican cosponsor for No Child Left Behind, House Education Committee chairman (now House minority leader) John Boehner of Ohio, who was causing real problems for the leadership of both parties.
Democrats didn’t like Boehner, and Republican leaders were wary of him because he was one of the few Republican legislators who strongly supported public education. He also was somewhat critical of vouchers that would allow public school students to attend private schools. Tuition vouchers were the most important program in the education reform package supported by the House GOP leadership.
As recounted by Juliet Eilperin in her book, Fight Club Politics, when Boehner and Miller negotiated a compromise education bill with Kennedy, the Republican leadership considered it far too liberal. They appealed their case to the president. Bush convened a meeting in the Oval Office with the Republican leaders and Boehner. The meeting was hastily arranged, catching the perpetually tanned Boehner on a golf course. He had to rush to the White House, borrowing a tie on the way.
President Bush went around the room giving each side a chance to make its case. In the end, he said, “I’m with Boehner; meeting over.” Thus, Bush got his first (and his only) bipartisan domestic-policy victory. It was a promising start after several years of growing partisanship and polarization between Democrats and Republicans. It would not last.
As much as George Bush wanted his public education bill, he wanted his tax-cut package even more. Like Ronald Reagan, he believed in supply-side economics, which assumed tax cuts, especially on high incomes, would “trickle down,” benefiting the entire economy. The Bush tax-cut plan was ambitious. It would take trillions in revenue from the government and return it to taxpayers. The issue was who would get the greatest tax relief.
Democrats argued that the Bush tax cuts would unfairly benefit the wealthiest Americans, provide far too little relief for the middle class, and do virtually nothing for low-income workers. Democrats said Bush wanted to give the surpluses to wealthy Republicans in the form of tax cuts that Democrats argued they didn’t need or deserve. Bush countered, accurately as it turned out, that under his plan, millions of low-income workers would be exempt from federal taxes altogether. In the end, he got his tax cuts, but with only a handful of Democratic votes. What had been a good start on consensus domestic policy with the Bush education package ended after a rancorous debate over tax cuts.
Tax cuts came early in Bush’s first term and with them the partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans that continued to worsen. George Bush soon learned that Washington Democrats were not like Texas Democrats. In Texas, Democrats controlled the legislature, which required Bush to compromise. With a Republican Congress, the president did not need to seek common ground.
That was just fine with Hill Republicans, particularly in the House. They weren’t interested in bipartisan cooperation with Democrats. After forty years under what they perceived as Democratic oppression, Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert, and specifically Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, instituted their version of political “get-back.” Democrats were mostly ignored and their efforts to influence legislation stymied. At times, Democrats were even shut out of committee hearings, especially during the final drafting of legislation. Republicans controlled the House floor debate and rarely allowed Democrats to offer amendments to pending legislation.
The climate in the Senate was slightly better for the Democrats, given the 50/50 split between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans became the Senate majority by virtue of Vice President Cheney’s vote as constitutional president of the Senate. Nonetheless, with such a divided Senate, Republicans were forced to work with Democrats. Then, in the spring of 2001, Vermont Republican senator Jim Jeffords declared himself an independent and announced he would vote with the Democrats. That put Democrats in the majority, 51–49.
Now the Republicans were furious. The change in the Senate brought even more heavy-handed Republican tactics in the House. Republican House members were pressured by DeLay to stay in line since any House bill would face a Democratic alternative in a House/ Senate conference to reconcile differences. Hastert and DeLay insisted on passing the most partisan and conservative bills possible. That tactic, they reasoned, would put the House in a stronger position when the bills went to a conference committee.
(The years Tom DeLay served as majority leader [1999–2005] of the House will be remembered as the high point of the polarization cycle. Perhaps a Democrat, had he or she been a majority leader during this period, would have contributed as heavily to the polarized climate as DeLay did, but we will never know. What we do know is that Tom DeLay was the most extreme partisan in Congress since Lyndon Johnson was majority leader in the Senate in the 1950s).
September 11, 2001, provided the one brief period when the freeze between the Republicans and Democrats in Washington would thaw. Few who witnessed the events that followed 9/11 will forget the evening of September 20, when George Bush addressed the Congress and the world on the response by the United States to the horrors of that fateful day. The president, who sometimes has trouble communicating, was as eloquent as anyone had ever heard him. Democrats embraced him, figuratively and literally. For one brief shining moment and for many weeks and months to follow, America united in common purpose. Despite the agony of 9/11, that unity would not last.
President Bush asked for and received a broad mandate from Congress to pursue the terrorists responsible for 9/11, declaring war on terror. With virtually no oversight and only a handful of dissenters, legislation was quickly approved allowing Bush to pursue terrorists anywhere in the world if he thought they might pose a threat to the United States. What became known as the Bush Doctrine would allow the president to engage in “preemptive” actions to stop terrorists before they could strike America.
President Bush said, “You are either with us, or against us,” and that line would become the governing philosophy for the Bush administration, not only on terrorism, but on his entire foreign-policy agenda. It was also a doctrine, as it turned out, that would be applied to his critics at home. This was hardly a domestic political message that encouraged consensus.
This “my way or the highway” attitude backfired because it united Democrats. If they were not allowed in the game, they would have to stick together and find ways to stymie the majority wherever possible. The Democrats’ embrace of the war on terror was sincere, but their resentment at the Republicans’ polarizing tactics was just as real. No Child Left Behind and the war resolution would be the only bipartisan legislative consensus reached between George Bush and the Democrats, although he did receive considerable Democratic support for the Patriot Act (a bill that would become the source of major divisions between Bush and the Democrats).