Don’t be fooled by the GOP’s next ‘Contract With America’

Don’t be fooled by the GOP’s next ‘Contract With America’

Paul Waldman — Read time: 3 minutes

Columnist

“I honest to god don’t know what they’re for,” President Biden said about Republicans at his Wednesday news conference. “What is their agenda?”

The truth is that if there’s one thing that unites the GOP, it’s that they hate Democrats, which isn’t much of a policy platform. But Republicans are now trying to create the impression that they have a concrete agenda to implement if they take control of the House.

As The Post reports, they’re “putting together a list of policy pledges to run on in the 2022 elections” and consulting with none other than Newt Gingrich to formulate this compelling platform.

The obvious analogue is the “Contract With America,” which Gingrich released before the first midterm election of Bill Clinton’s presidency, in which Republicans won a sweeping victory that gave them control of Congress.

But we have to understand the real history of the contract, because Republicans will endlessly repeat the myth they have since created around it.

Here’s how the myth goes: In 1994, serious-minded Republicans presented a detailed blueprint for reform. The voting public was so moved by this contract that they delivered to those Republicans an overwhelming victory and a mandate for change, which Republicans then pursued.

Here’s the truth: Most voters had never heard of the contract before the election, and almost none said that it made them more likely to vote Republican. But after the election — an undoubtedly big win, but one boosted by the GOP’s status as the opposition in a midterm — Gingrich convinced people that Republicans won because of the contract, despite the complete lack of evidence for that assertion.

The contract itself was a mix of standard Republican policies (tax cuts, welfare cuts) and reform proposals that have surface appeal but are terrible ideas (term limits, a line-item veto), with a little demagoguery thrown in (“No U.S. troops under U.N. command”). Almost none became law.

But the myth endures. And at times like this, when Republicans decide they need an agenda, it means trotting out some new version of the “Contract With America.”

The problem is that these days, Republicans just don’t really do policy. Most don’t care enough to craft detailed legislation to solve complex policy challenges. They like to write the kind of bill you can slap together in a few minutes. Ban critical race theory! Let people take guns into bars! Make it illegal to remove Confederate statues!

The good news for Republicans is that their new contract can be as simple-minded as they like.

The original contract was something all too familiar in our politics: a gimmick that political reporters felt obliged to treat as though it were serious and substantive, simply because one of the two major parties presented it as such. Republicans will no doubt hope that the new contract gets the same reception.

Of course, even if Republicans win the House and/or the Senate, their agenda won’t matter much, since there will still be a Democratic president to veto whatever they pass. It’s not as though under Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker we’ll immediately get a national abortion ban and more tax cuts for the wealthy; those will have to wait for a GOP president with both houses of Congress behind him.

We know what the real GOP agenda is for the next three years: to stop Democrats from enacting their agenda. If Republicans win in November, that’s what they’ll do, along with mounting an endless series of bogus investigations designed to create the impression that something fishy must be going on in the Biden administration.

They can produce a “plan,” but given who we’re talking about here, there’s little chance it will be full of practical ideas and well-thought-out proposals. Which is fine — their contract will be a campaign document, one most voters will ignore.

But don’t try to convince us all that it’s something meaningful, or that they ought to get any more credit for producing it than any candidate does for putting out a campaign brochure.