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The trickiest business in either house could be dealing with the contract's promised tax cuts, which Gingrich hopes to have approved in the House by the end of April. First, Gingrich will have to confront hordes of tax lawyers and lobbyists awakened to the exhilarating smell of a major tax bill brewing. With no new spending programs in the works, the tax bill will be the only game in town for those who make their millions winning special breaks for special interests. Even if Gingrich uses the formidable power of the Speaker's office to assure that a coherent piece of legislation emerges from the House, he could be tripped up by the rules of the Senate, which allow unlimited amendments. Says Democratic Congressman Bob Matsui, a Ways and Means veteran of many tax fights: "I don't see the Senate being able to sustain that kind of discipline. They never have."
Before he can even get that far, Gingrich has promised to do something even harder: find the money to pay for the tax cuts. The first place the Budget Committee and the appropriators will look is this year's budget, but with the fiscal year already three months old, they will not find the big money they need there, even if they obliterate several existing programs. Next, in separate legislation, they will turn to future years, but will have to balance the tax-cut goal with another of the contract's promises: beefing up the Pentagon budget. The job is particularly difficult for the House's relatively inexperienced Republican staff, which finds itself in a brand-new world of reality. As a former G.O.P. Budget Committee staff member put it, "When you are in the minority, you have the luxury of knowing that nothing you do will ever really happen. You can cobble the numbers together for maximum political effect."
Now Gingrich's Republicans are already in the dizzying position of being the leaders and watching the Democrats starting to play the spoilers. Weeks before the session began, House minority leader Dick Gephardt, determined to prove that his Democrats are still in the game, came forward with a tax-cut plan that is both cheaper than Gingrich's and more closely targeted to the middle class. One of Gingrich's recent planning sessions came on a morning when the Washington Post had announced what would have seemed preposterous before the election: the Clinton White House was actually thinking about killing an entire Cabinet agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Incoming Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, 42, a tousle-haired Dennis- the-Menace look-alike who has been known to brandish a bullwhip on the House floor, exulted, "This is our stuff!"
Dressed in a maroon turtleneck and khakis, Kasich had dropped by Gingrich's office to present his latest proposals for one of the biggest challenges in selling the "Contract with America": making the numbers add up. Most of the . other new G.O.P. leaders had gathered around the coffee table where he sat, anxious to see how Kasich was faring with a job that defies political physics: figuring out how to spend more than $100 billion over the next five years on an income-tax cut, as well as numerous tax breaks for wealthy investors and business, while beefing up spending for the military and without increasing the deficit. Throw the balanced-budget amendment on top of all that, and it would seem that he was well into the realm of the impossible.