Senators Trent Lott and John Breaux announce the vote on the 2002 budget
George W. Bush won back his wandering GOP moderates — and 15 Democrats too — as the Senate on Friday approved the 2002 budget resolution right on time.
Of course, he also lost about $330 billion in the bargain.
But he took it with a smile. "I applaud the Senate's action, and thank the Republicans and Democrats who helped make it happen," Bush said at the White House after the Senate passed a budget that pared his $1.6 trillion baby to $1.27 trillion. He also promised that this wasn't quite over — there's always the reconciliation process when the House's to-the-letter $1.6 trillion version meets the one the Senate messed with — but until then, he'd settle for taking credit for what would inevitably be "the largest tax relief in decades."
But Trent Lott wouldn't have been in such a hurry if he'd known it was going to come out like this. And Public Enemy No. 1 for loyal Bush Republicans isn't John McCain anymore — it's Jim Jeffords.
The Vermont moderate might as well run next time as an independent after resisting all of Dick Cheney's blandishments and holding out for more special-education dollars than the White House was willing to offer. Jeffords then teamed up Thursday with willfully centrist Democrat John Breaux for a $1.2 trillion version that effectively broke Lott's back — and opened the door to something Bush hadn't talked much about since the tax-cut sales pitch officially began back in February: a bipartisan consensus.
Thursday night, Bush sounded shocked that the B-word might mean more than twisting arms until 60 senators saw things his way. "People of different parties, and as I have discovered, some in my own party, think we ought to spend more than I think we ought to do, and have smaller tax relief," he told a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
By Friday morning, Lott was telling his leadership he'd wooed all he could woo, and it wasn't working. White House legislative liaison Nicholas Calio notified reporters that "we're likely to see something that is a bit smaller" than the full $1.6 trillion. And loyalists from Phil Gramm to Rick Santorum were waving the white flag of a compromise that Bush had just about emptied his political bank account to try and avoid.
The Bushies spent Friday chasing Democrats like nervous freshman Ben Nelson of Nebraska in hopes of getting back to 50 votes (Georgia Democrat Zell Miller canceled out Chafee's defection a while ago) and the Cheney gavel. But in the end Nelson found safer company with the Mod Squad, and the conventional wisdom about centrists calling the tune in a divided Senate turned out to be right after all.
So much for the 50 votes, and Dick Cheney's busy week playing tiebreaker. The Bush Republicans will be back for another try later this spring — the budget "resolution" is non-binding, and can be tossed out when the House and Senate get together for the reconciliation process. Bush can certainly tell himself and the country that it's better to be north of $1.2 trillion than stuck at $750 billion, where the other 35 Democrats (including Tom Daschle and his leadership, who also managed to claim victory afterward) wanted him. And for now, Bush will take it.
But it still has to sting. Bush asked his half of the Senate for one thing — his $1.6 trillion tax cut — and all it took was one lousy moderate to open the whole thing up for — gasp — negotiation. This after Dick Cheney had rounded up all 50 of them Tuesday and told them that if they couldn't hold together and give Bush the budget he wanted, "we might as well hand the keys of this place to Tom Daschle." (Just imagine what he was muttering in those private meetings with Jeffords.)
That's not the same as handing the keys to his legislative agenda to Daschle — if anything, Breaux, who at the press conference even stole Bush's line about changing the culture of Washington, is holding them now. But it may be the end of Bush's grandest illusion: the one about having a mandate.
The man addressed a joint session of Congress. He barnstormed through wavering lawmakers' home states. He scratched backs and he twisted arms (or at least Cheney did). Heck, he even won Florida again — and in the end, he still has to admit to the country that there's a difference between what he wants and what he gets. (And not just with China.)
Looks like Bush may turn out to be the bipartisan-consensus president after all. But he may have lost his chance to make it look like crossing the aisle was his idea.