Political Blunders Could Undermine Gop Revolution

The Republican revolution against big government continues its relentless advance, a mighty steamroller threatening to flatten everything in its path.

The revolution is winning rave reviews from the nation’s business sector.

“Highly productive, refreshingly positive,” declares the nation’s biggest small-business lobby, the National Federation of Independent Business.

“For the first time in decades,” says federation president Jack Faris, “the NFIB is able to play offense rather than defense.”

Finally, business advocates can “promote legislation that helps create jobs and grow the economy, rather than fend off misguided proposals that tighten the regulatory straitjacket of Big Government.”

Here at home, too, Republicans capitalized on their numerical superiority in the 1995 Washington state Legislature.

And following the session, party officialdom boasted, “We promised to pass legislation in seven key areas, and we delivered in all seven areas.”

Well, not quite.

Due to the intransigence of right-wing hardliners, no action was taken on welfare reform. Zilch.

Republicans got their act together, however, to legislate tax breaks adding up to over half a billion dollars for business.

Further, the party’s official newsletter proclaims, “This year, Republicans passed health care reform which gives choice back to patients, where it should be. It also expands access to health care, and ensures that insurance is available to everyone.”

So the Republicans claim. But others find it is difficult to fathom how rolling back universal coverage “expands access to health care” or “ensures that insurance is available to everyone.”

And for many, it is the height of hypocrisy and cynicism for Republican lawmakers to deny employer coverage to citizens, while providing free coverage for themselves at public expense. This, even though they work for the public only a few months out of the year.

Nonetheless, the Association of Washington Business extolled the GOP’s efforts as “Good for business.”

“A look at the AWB Legislative Scorecard,” says the state business lobby, “shows that, with just a couple of exceptions, AWB accomplished virtually all of its goals for this session.”

Goal No. 1: Rewrite health reform, with financing and choreography provided by insurance companies; followed by regulatory reform, then tax breaks for business.

As noted above, the GOP rammed through an array of tax benefits for business - especially corporate giants - and wealthy individuals. Gov. Mike Lowry vetoed a couple.

But Lowry couldn’t veto a property rights initiative that Republican legislators passed themselves, thus averting the threat, as well as a vote by the people.

However opponents of the measure, reputedly the strictest property rights act in America, are circulating a petition to put the initiative back on the ballot this November. If they don’t hand in 90,834 valid voter signatures by July 21, the act becomes law.

“We’re a little over halfway there,” opposition spokesman John Lamson assured me. “We will make it. We have no choice.”

Initiative 164 as enacted by the GOP would require taxpayers to pay property owners for any loss in value due to regulation for the public benefit. Critics claim it would make land use planning, zoning and growth management exorbitantly costly and chaotic.

“It goes too far,” charges Lamson. “It’s too extreme.”

That’s what others are saying about several state and national issues.

It doesn’t take a liberal to question the benefit to society or to taxpayers of curtailing welfare for the poor on one hand but continuing corporate subsidies on the other, while enacting tax breaks for the upper crust.

Following a GOP sweep at the polls last fall, political pundits decreed that only an excess of rightwing extremism could bring down the revolution.

In the wake of the 1995 state Legislature, some followers of the revolution feel used, cheated, cheapened. Are leaders of the revolt allowing power to corrupt the cause? Did business reach too far, and grab too much?

More than a few supporters of the revolution, decades in the making, wonder if this is what they envisioned, and if the movement is winning, or running out of steam.

, DataTimes MEMO: Associate Editor Frank Bartel’s column appears on Monday, Wednesday and Sunday.