The Week

Groping for excuses for his ouster, Ben Chavis missed the best one of all. He should have said the only reason the NAACP fired him is that he’s black.

The ten-point package of reforms that House Republicans will announce on the steps of the Capitol September 27 is close to completion. This “Contract with America” is meant to represent the legislation Republicans will pass in the first 100 days of the next Congress if they win a majority. The congressmen deserve points for moving in the right direction (the welfare-reform package, for one, is tougher than the leadership’s original proposal) and for realizing that merely being anti-Clinton can carry them only so far. The package apparently contains numerous tax-relief measures (a child tax credit, elimination of the marriage penalty, a rollback of Mr. Clinton’s Social Security tax hike, beefed-up IRAs), some supply-side elixir (a capital-gains tax cut and indexation), meaningful congressional reforms (cutting committee staff by a third, applying laws to Congress), term limits, legal reforms, as well as old stand-bys like the line item veto. This would all make fine legislation. But bolder would have been better. Why not an assault on overall tax rates? And why do the House Republicans maintain their shifty silence on affirmative-action quotas and on immigration? They respond that in dueling with a President now almost synonymous with the unfulfilled promise, they want to focus on the strictly attainable. Well and good. But by the time the Republicans have attained the attainable, the voters may have thought the unthinkable.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Groping for excuses for his ouster, Ben Chavis missed the best one of all. He should have said the only reason the NAACP fired him is that he’s black.

The ten-point package of reforms that House Republicans will announce on the steps of the Capitol September 27 is close to completion. This “Contract with America” is meant to represent the legislation Republicans will pass in the first 100 days of the next Congress if they win a majority. The congressmen deserve points for moving in the right direction (the welfare-reform package, for one, is tougher than the leadership’s original proposal) and for realizing that merely being anti-Clinton can carry them only so far. The package apparently contains numerous tax-relief measures (a child tax credit, elimination of the marriage penalty, a rollback of Mr. Clinton’s Social Security tax hike, beefed-up IRAs), some supply-side elixir (a capital-gains tax cut and indexation), meaningful congressional reforms (cutting committee staff by a third, applying laws to Congress), term limits, legal reforms, as well as old stand-bys like the line item veto. This would all make fine legislation. But bolder would have been better. Why not an assault on overall tax rates? And why do the House Republicans maintain their shifty silence on affirmative-action quotas and on immigration? They respond that in dueling with a President now almost synonymous with the unfulfilled promise, they want to focus on the strictly attainable. Well and good. But by the time the Republicans have attained the attainable, the voters may have thought the unthinkable.