Many senators in the chamber had been around in the 1980s when so much effort had gone into the Gramm-Rudman deficit reductions. Finance chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa and budget committee chairman Pete Domenici of New Mexico were among them. Many had been there in 1990 when the president's father, President George H. W. Bush, agreed to raise taxes to shrink the deficit, a big factor in his loss two years later. With presidential leadership exercised and political pain already endured, why would we suddenly want to turn the treasury upside down and shake out every last dime.
To me, the tax cut was a stalking horse. The Cheney-Bush strategy behind the cut was to set the tone--to preempt the Congress not just on taxes but on every issue. It would tame any future resistance to a radical agenda by serving up this politically irresistible prize: lawmakers could go home and say they had voted to cut taxes. The White House was out to neuter Congress, and the minute Congress rolled over for the cuts, it set the stage for one-branch rule in America and all the consequences we live with today. The two aggressive personalities at the top of the executive branch had tested the Congress and had found it lacking. A coequal branch of government? In their wisdom, the Founders had given us power to respond when events demand that we check and balance an unwise president. I looked around in the Senate and saw few who had the courage to wield that vital power.
Every bully and blowhard in the world sets the terms of intimidation right off the bat. The time to stand up is sooner instead of later. My older brother, Zech, taught me that important lesson by example when I was in the third grade at Potowomut Elementary School in Warwick, Rhode Island. In front of a cheering schoolyard, he put up his fists and boxed a bully out of a bad attitude. But the president had our number the minute we meekly acquiesced to his radical tax policy, and that would serve him well when he wanted to start a war on the false threat of a Saddam Hussein poised to attack America with weapons of mass destruction.
Many Americans' first image of the Bush presidency is date-stamped September 11, 2001. They forget the pitched political battles of his first nine months in office. The central front in his war on Congress was this $1.6 trillion raid on the public purse.
The outcome was uncertain, given the dynamics of an evenly divided Senate. Democrats were largely opposed, but Georgia Democrat Zell Miller, a throwback to the precivil rights South, had defected and even signed on as a cosponsor of the Bush tax cuts. Democrats were especially worried that John Breaux of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska might waver. The Bush administration certainly put every bit of pressure they could on senators Breaux and Nelson back home, and on every other Democrat in a state that had voted Bush-Cheney.
The Democrats held steady, and in April, Ben Nelson, John Breaux, and I called a press conference to say we would use our votes to trim the $1.6 trillion to $1.25 trillion. If we could get one more Republican to stand with us, we could make it happen. We needed Jim Jeffords of Vermont and had been told to expect him at the press conference, but where was he? Stalling for time, Senator Breaux cracked jokes to keep an impatient media at least semi-entertained. Then the blue curtains at the edge of the Capitol press gallery parted and in walked the Vermonter, our critical vote.
