In My Time - Dick Cheney [164]
We worked hard to prevent Jim from switching, and certainly weren’t pleased when we failed. But as I look back now, I believe that Jeffords’s switch actually contributed to our victory in the 2002 midterm elections. He put the Democrats in control, but their margin was so narrow there was very little they could actually get done. Their inability to show any real accomplishment hurt them and helped us when the voters went to the polls a little over a year later. The president’s poll numbers were also high, near 70 percent, and when the midterm results were in, we had increased our majority in the House by eight seats and gained two in the Senate, thus returning that body to Republican control. The last time a president’s party had gained seats in both houses of Congress in the first midterm election of his term was when FDR was in office in 1934.
IN 2003 THE PRESIDENT proposed a second major round of tax cuts, and I again spent a good deal of time securing the votes we needed to get them passed. Even though we had enlarged our majority in the House and taken control of the Senate, the task wasn’t easy. While all Republicans favored a tax cut, there were a few who didn’t want to go with the $550 billion the president was proposing. They were worried about the deficit, a concern I generally appreciated. I have been quoted as saying around this time that “deficits don’t matter” and citing Ronald Reagan to bolster the case, but of course I thought deficits mattered. I just believed that it was important to see them in context, to note that while Ronald Reagan’s dramatic increases in the defense budget and his historic tax cuts did push the deficit from 2.7 percent of the gross domestic product in fiscal year 1980 to 6 percent in fiscal year 1983, his spending on defense helped put the Soviet Union out of business, and his tax cuts helped spur one of the longest sustained waves of prosperity in our history. The result was a peace dividend, increased federal revenues, and, eventually, lower deficits.
In 2003, with the deficit just 1.5 percent of the GDP and the economy in the doldrums, the tax package the president proposed certainly seemed justified to me, but Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio thought it was too large. Chuck Grassley, needing their votes on a budget resolution, agreed to a cap of $350 billion on the tax package, a deal to which Majority Leader Bill Frist gave his blessing.
But no one told the House leadership, and they were thoroughly irritated when the deal became public. House passage of a $550 billion tax cut on May 9 did nothing to ease their aggravation, because now a conference between the House and Senate was looming. How could you have a conference, House leaders wanted to know, when one of the leading conferees, Senator Grassley, had already announced a limit?
The president invited all the players for a drink on the Truman Balcony on May 19, 2003. Speaker of the House Denny Hastert was one of those who enjoyed the fine view from the balcony that evening, as were House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley. The president talked about his tax cut plan, which would speed up rate reductions scheduled for coming years and eliminate the individual tax on dividends. The point of it was to promote economic growth, and he wanted to get it in place fast, by Memorial Day at the latest.
Denny Hastert, one of the most even-tempered, easygoing men I’ve ever known, then spoke up—and his exasperation with his Senate colleagues was pretty obvious. He recommended to Majority Leader Frist that since Senator Grassley had already staked out a position, he should not be appointed to the conference. There was silence as the group on the balcony calculated the number of improprieties Hastert had just committed. There was, first of all, the House telling the Senate what to do and added to that was the insult of anyone daring to propose