I warned John and the others what was going to happen, and that if we tried to stop the process we would get nothing but heartache. The best we could accomplish was to control and influence things, and keep the lid on the more ridiculous stuff, by throwing spotlights on them as necessary. We also had to control our own side, who now that they were in positions of power wanted to get their own blessing of pork.
Some of the bills were going to be shitcanned. After a few weeks of review, the word came down that Clinton was going to flat out veto my Defending the 2nd Amendment bill. He had just signed the Brady bill into law in the last session and here we were trashing it. While I hadn't touched the section on requiring background checks on handgun purchase, we had totally wiped out the ban on assault weapons and replaced it with a piece on limiting magazine sizes, and were violating states rights on the permit issue. Worse, I was both a murderous bastard (no, Bill didn't actually call me that, but he came close, citing my 'proclivity to shoot first and ask questions later') and calling me a shill for the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which I wasn't even a member of. I simply shrugged and began working on finding enough votes to override the veto. I could probably do that in the House; the Senate was much more questionable. I would need to line up 67 votes there, and might have to accept a watered down bill to manage that.
All the other stuff, tort reform and welfare fixes and social security and such, they would do the rope-a-dope technique. Every little bit would be fucked with and delayed, and modified so much as to be totally unrecognizable, in the hopes that we would drop the hot potato before they could get Clinton to veto it. Some of it they figured would die of its own weight. We would never get enough Congressmen to sign off on any meaningful Congressional reform, so Bill could stand back and look statesmanlike and sorrowful when we couldn't even get our own house in order.
Newt and the Majority Leader and Whip, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, were taking a more laid back approach to some of this. Newt's big plan wasn't so much the legislation as the spectacle and effect. He had used the Contract with America to take back both houses of Congress. If we got the legislation to pass, so much the better. We had a big meeting with the Gang of Eight and the Republican leadership of both the House and the Senate in February, and got our marching orders. Newt and Bob Dole were working on driving a stake through Clinton's heart for the next election. Generalship on the various bills he was leaving up to DeLay and those of us with our names on the bills.
The biggest change between now and the first time through on this for me was that this time we already had the Senate lined up. On my first trip through, Newt had only handled things in the House, and didn't have any decent support in the other house. Since nothing can go to the President until both houses pass it and cobble something together, this added months to the process. This time we had started much earlier. We had brought some Senators in on things. We had Senate versions of all our bills ready to go the same day we dropped the House bills into the hopper. By April we had most of the bills passed, sometimes over Democratic screaming, but passed. (Well, not Congressional Reform or Tort Reform, they would probably never pass!) Now it was up to Bill Clinton to either sign them into law or veto them.
Clinton had ten days to sign them into law or veto them. If the Congress went out of session before he could sign them, they were effectively vetoed. (This is known as a pocket veto and is a useful tool to get a law passed that nobody really wanted and then get the President to dump it. You simply wait until the end of the session, pass it, and the President just ignores it until the clock runs out. Congress has managed to do something about whatever without really doing anything.) We didn't give him that luxury. He waited nine days before giving the chop to most of them. Surprisingly, the Rebuilding America Act he let pass, probably because there was sufficient Democratic pork in it. I tried to control it, even going so far as to pull an all-nighter in the committee conference room with the Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Larry Pressler, during final markup. Still, we had plenty of pork for everybody.
I did not envy John Boehner and his Balanced Budget Act, or John Doolittle and his Business Tax Reform Act. Doolittle had promised that his focus was on eliminating loopholes and tax shelters. He was promising to lower rates if we eliminated loopholes and shelters. Everybody liked the first part of that, but not so much the second. Then again, if Boehner could close the budget gap, which had been over $200 billion last year, we could afford lower rates. It had been done the first time through, why not do it again?
Meanwhile I tried to get home and be father and husband. One of the benefits of having a driver and security detail was that it made it easier to haul Charlie and his bike to various races. When I started with increased security and drivers I had bought a Ford F-150 with a hitch package, and a small enclosed trailer to carry his bike. Then, with one of the drivers hauling the gear, the family could follow in a second people-mover minivan. In neither life had I ever learned to drive while towing something, but I could usually find a driver who had learned somewhere. Charlie was now competing outside of Maryland as well, into Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Virginia.
Charlie was making a real name for himself now, and was actually interviewed at a race in Hedgesville, out near Hagerstown but just across the border into West Virginia. He was named along with several other junior riders in a piece on 'Pros of the Future!' I commented to Marilyn later that what he really liked about the magazine was the pictures of the pretty girls standing next to the motorcycles. My wife rolled her eyes but didn't argue. Our little boy was growing up, and showing decidedly heterosexual tendencies.
I sat down with him one evening after a Boy Scout troop meeting, one where he seemed a bit listless and disinterested. "What's with you and the Scouts?", I asked.
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"You, tonight. You didn't seem all that thrilled to be there."
Charlie grimaced. "It's not the Scouts. Next month we're doing a camping trip down to someplace in Virginia. Some place called Winchester or something."
I nodded. "That's in the Shenandoah Valley. Very nice area. Should be fun."
"Yeah, but that's the same weekend as a race in Pittsburgh. I mean, I mentioned that to you, right? You said I could go and all." Charlie was sounding a touch whiney.
"Okay, settle down. Sure, you probably said it, and that's fine with me. You need to make a decision. You can't do everything. School's the most important thing, and if you don't bring your grades up and keep them there, there's no racing anyway." Charlie looked horrorstricken at the thought, but nodded mutely. "After that, you need to decide what you're going to do. If you can't do both the racing and the Scouting, you need to make a decision. You can't do them both half-assed. You need to figure out what's important to you."
He nodded again, seemingly lost in thought, so I kept on. "What about school? You were on the JV football team last fall, right? Do you plan to keep playing sports? Can you do that, too? Do you expect your mother to take you to all of these places and still manage to come down to Washington? She's also taking your sisters to do their stuff, too."