Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron K. Unz confirmed today that he may run for the Senate in California as a Republican next year. "There's a pretty reasonable chance I might try it," he told NR. "I will decide in next two or three weeks. Right now, there's a better than 50-50 chance I will do it."

Unz is the author of Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual-education initiative voters approved last year. He is currently sponsoring a campaign-finance reform proposal, which should appear on the state ballot next year. (Senator John McCain recently endorsed that effort.) In 1994, Unz challenged Gov. Pete Wilson in the GOP primary and won about one-third of the vote.

Unz says that congressman Tom Campbell's decision about whether to run for the Republican nomination will influence what he does, but a Campbell candidacy "won't automatically get me out." Even if Unz passed that hurdle, he would then face the incumbent Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, who is widely viewed as a kamikaze mission. "I've done some polling on that," says Unz. "She's strong — but not as strong as people think."

Unz says he would definitely run on his signature issue: bilingual education. "We had Prop. 227 out here, but Congress certainly hasn't done anything about it," he says. More details on Unz's views will be available in the November issue of Commentary magazine, which is currently set to carry a lengthy article by Unz on the politics of race, ethnicity, and assimilation.

Two weeks ago, the Washington Post ran a front-page story by Eric Pianin on Republican senator Arlen Specter's alleged plans to create a fictional "thirteenth month" as a budget gimmick. It turned out that Specter's "forward-funding" idea wasn't really anything out of the (depressingly) ordinary, and the "thirteenth month" bit was spun more or less out of whole cloth. Democrats, and conservative critics of the Republican Congress, are still making the most of it.

Today's Post story, by Pianin and Juliet Eilperin, appears to further the Democrats' spin again. They report that Republicans are already set to spend surplus funds from Social Security that they have vowed to protect. The evidence for this backsliding is a Congressional Budget Office report issued yesterday. But that report was a response to a request by John Spratt, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, using his assumptions. If Republicans trim the appropriations bills remaining to be passed, however, they can avoid spending surplus funds. Which is what CBO head Dan Crippen said today, after Republicans asked him to judge what would happen under their assumptions.

Republicans are drawing a line in the sand here. "The leaders have said they will not schedule on the floor anything that touches one penny of Social Security," says Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for House majority leader Dick Armey. "Our odds of reaching the target are one hundred percent." But getting there presents unappetizing choices. One option is to cut all the remaining appropriations bills by 1.5 percent. Another is to make some one-time savings by changing the way the Earned Income Credit program works: It would pay out the same amount of money, but monthly instead of yearly; the timing of the switch accounts for most of the saving in the next fiscal year. While defensible as policy, it could be politically risky — as Sen. Phil Gramm warned his Republican colleagues yesterday. George W. Bush probably doomed this idea by saying today, "I don't think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor."

Updated By:
Ramesh Ponnuru - Senior Editor
John J. Miller - National Political Reporter
Kate Dwyer - Editorial Associate