The Week

President Clinton has finally had it with Bosnia. He’s thinking of deploying the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Item by item, the Contract with America is falling a couple of Republican senators short of enactment. Regulatory reform is the latest victim. By the time the reform bill hit the Senate floor in July it had been weakened to such an extent—no provision for applying the reforms to current rules; weakened provisions for judicial review of regulations—that it had lost the support of free-marketeers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Even then it was headed for trouble with the Democrats. They set up a negotiating troika of John Kerry (Mass.), Carl Levin (Mich.), and John Glenn (Ohio) that was less interested in compromise than in scuttling the bill. One list of demands the negotiators submitted to Republicans actually had an asterisk reserving the right to make more demands—just in case the current ones were met. Meanwhile, the OMB’s czarina of regulatory affairs, Sally Katzen, kept up a drumbeat of outrageous charges, while the media, especially ABC News, retailed its own (children dying from tainted meat topped the list). The GOP response was lost in the buzz. In the end, Bob Dole got all Republicans, even prodigal moderates like John Chafee, to vote for cloture on the bill. But that wasn’t enough. And it won’t be until Senate Republicans get some new colleagues.

Featured Tags

William F. Buckley Jr.

President Clinton has finally had it with Bosnia. He’s thinking of deploying the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Item by item, the Contract with America is falling a couple of Republican senators short of enactment. Regulatory reform is the latest victim. By the time the reform bill hit the Senate floor in July it had been weakened to such an extent—no provision for applying the reforms to current rules; weakened provisions for judicial review of regulations—that it had lost the support of free-marketeers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Even then it was headed for trouble with the Democrats. They set up a negotiating troika of John Kerry (Mass.), Carl Levin (Mich.), and John Glenn (Ohio) that was less interested in compromise than in scuttling the bill. One list of demands the negotiators submitted to Republicans actually had an asterisk reserving the right to make more demands—just in case the current ones were met. Meanwhile, the OMB’s czarina of regulatory affairs, Sally Katzen, kept up a drumbeat of outrageous charges, while the media, especially ABC News, retailed its own (children dying from tainted meat topped the list). The GOP response was lost in the buzz. In the end, Bob Dole got all Republicans, even prodigal moderates like John Chafee, to vote for cloture on the bill. But that wasn’t enough. And it won’t be until Senate Republicans get some new colleagues.