Bush's Lies & Hypocrisy Continue

George

2004-02-10 03:18:35 UTC

So, Now Bigger Is Better?
By David S. Broder

When George W. Bush was running for president, he did not campaign as
an enemy of the federal government. But he claimed that he would limit
its growth and power. And he derided his opponent, Al Gore, as an
advocate of "big government."

In a speech to California Republicans, Bush said he shared former
President Ronald Reagan's belief that "you can't be for big government
and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy." He promised that
if he won, Washington would "give options, not orders. At its best,"
he added, "government can help us live our lives, but it must never
run our lives."

Bush didn't stop there. In placing himself squarely in the
conservative tradition that holds that limited government is the best
guarantee of freedom, he called for a return to a concept of
federalism respectful of states' rights and local authority. When it
comes to education, he said, he would fight any scheme that would
transfer power from parents and teachers to "some distant central
office." Asked about the economy, he said he would keep government
modest, because "the surest way to make sure prosperity slows down is
to expand the role and scope and size of the federal government."

That was then. Now that Bush is running the federal government, its
size doesn't bother him so much. Two years after taking office, Bush
is presiding over the biggest, most expensive federal government in
history. He has created a mammoth Cabinet department, increased
federal spending, imposed new federal rules on local and state
governments, and injected federal requirements into every public
school in America.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is expanding too, and not only because it
is scouring the world for Sept. 11-style threats. It now seeks to
fulfill a more expansive vision of America's role that mirrors Bush's
more expansive vision of government in general. Gone is the Bush who
spoke of "humility" in foreign affairs and warned against
"nation-building" and overextending America's military. Now the
administration talks about meeting America's "unparalleled
responsibilities" as it maintains a quarter-million troops abroad,
garrisons in more than two dozen countries and smaller detachments in
114 others. As it does so, the administration must reinforce the
military and intelligence infrastructure here to help sustain missions
abroad.

Money is one measure of the new era of big government. Federal
spending, measured as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP),
declined every year from fiscal 1991, when the Cold War ended, through
fiscal 2000, the final full year of the Clinton administration. It
fell from 22.3 percent of GDP to 18.4 percent in that decade, but
began edging back up in the first year of Bush's presidency and is
projected to hit 19.6 percent this year. Some of the Bush increases
are tied to legislation adopted under Clinton, but the Bush
administration has not turned back the tide.

While the administration and Congress have fostered the impression
that the war against terrorism is to blame for rising federal
spending, Fortune magazine writer Jeff Birnbaum has observed that
"only about a third of the additional spending this year can be
attributed to the war on terror. The rest is testament to a fact that
predates Sept. 11: The era of big government has returned."

The growth of the federal government's influence cannot be measured in
terms of money alone. The promulgation of a sweeping set of standards
for America's schools has triggered a widening protest from state and
local officials, who complain that the Bush administration is
interfering with their own education reform efforts and usurping what
has traditionally been a jealously guarded realm of state and local
initiative. And this from the party that once vowed to eliminate the
Education Department.

The emerging blueprint for homeland security has also riled state
officials. Its potential for commandeering local public health and
safety agencies has prompted the conservative Republican governor of
Utah to try to rally colleagues from both parties to turn back what he
and others see as a genuine threat to the constitutional balance of
authority within the federal system. "Because the call for protecting
our people is so powerful," says Gov. Mike Leavitt (R), "we could be
on the verge of remaking our whole system of government."

Administration officials dismiss these criticisms as exaggerated and
say that Bush has simply responded to changing circumstances and
urgent national needs. They note that the president has tried with
considerable success to reduce the tax burden and ease regulation of
the environment and industries such as communications.

Nonetheless, the government that Bush cedes to his eventual successor
seems certain to be one that will be playing a more expansive,
aggressive and intrusive role than the very big government he
inherited.

Take education. The hallmark of Bush's domestic policy has been his
drive to raise the standards and improve the performance of America's
schools through a major piece of social legislation, the No Child Left
Behind Act (NCLB). It sounds noble enough, but the law has produced a
tug of war. On one side, there are those who want to set rigorous
goals for reading and math, backed by stiff tests for every student.
On the other, there are those who fear such a regimen would stifle
teachers' creativity, infringe on local control of schools and
threaten to label so many public schools as failures that support
would build for private school vouchers.

That fight is raging more strongly than ever -- with many in the
states saying that Big Brother in Washington is winning. "Everything
is tipping toward [federal] preemption," says Paul Houston, executive
director of the National Association of School Administrators, a major
education group. "So you're getting a lot of friction and frustration
and some outright resistance."

A letter from Education Secretary Rodney Paige to state school
superintendents last October raised many hackles. While thanking those
"who have accepted the challenge" of NCLB, he complained that "some
states have lowered the bar of expectations to hide the low
performance of their schools." In what was taken as a clear warning
shot, Paige said, "Those who play semantic games or try to tinker with
state numbers . . . stand in the way of progress and reform. They are
the enemies of equal justice and equal opportunity. They are
apologists for failure. And they will not succeed . . ."

A test case seems to be developing in Nebraska, an overwhelmingly
Republican state whose education commissioner, Doug Christensen, says,
"I hear the rhetoric about local control and flexibility, but I don't
see that. What I see are regimentation and uniformity."

A recent meeting with Education Department officials left Christensen
balking at the requirement for annual reading and math tests for every
student in the third through eighth grades. "Our classes in those
grades range from 15 to 18 students," he says. "Our teachers know how
well every child is doing and every school has its own system for
measuring that. We don't want to impose an outside standard that is
not necessary. The responsibility for educating our kids is ours, and
I am not going to defend some federal requirement unless we think it
is good for our kids."

Asked what he has heard from the federal officials, Christensen
replies: "They said, 'You have work to do.' "

There have been similar disputes in states ranging from Vermont to
Louisiana and from Michigan to North Carolina. "This is a fundamental
shift," Houston says. "It is a huge federal intrusion in an area that
traditionally has been a matter of state and local responsibility. The
American people haven't realized it yet, because it came out of a
Republican administration, from a group of people that normally says,
'Hands off. Keep the bureaucrats out.' "

Administration officials say that most states are cooperating. Sandy
Kress, a former White House education adviser who helped design NCLB,
says, "this is designed to be hard. If there weren't gnashing of teeth
at this point, we would have missed the mark."

But the fact remains that Washington is stepping further into the
management of local schools than ever before. Ray Sheppach, executive
director of the National Governors Association, says, "What I see in
education and in regulatory matters generally is continued preemption
of state authority. It's kind of like Nixon goes to China. The
Democrats could never have done this kind of thing."

Homeland security is the newest arena of big government growth. The
anti-terrorism campaign spawned the largest bureaucracy Washington has
seen since the birth of the Department of Defense -- the new Homeland
Security Department. Moreover, anti-terrorism has been used to justify
bold intrusions into the privacy of individuals and extraordinary
security measures that tread upon some generally accepted rights.

Already, critics of the Justice Department have charged that expanded
wiretaps and the detention and arrest of aliens have violated civil
rights. The American Civil Liberties Union has been joined by such
staunch conservatives as former House majority leader Dick Armey in
expressing alarm at the breadth of authority that Attorney General
John Ashcroft has claimed in what Ashcroft calls an "unrelenting"
campaign against terrorism.

The Homeland Security Department also may threaten federal preemption
of some of the most basic functions of local and state government,
including those of the police, public safety and public health
departments. "The further down you drill in this whole area of
homeland security," says Utah's Leavitt, a political ally of Bush,
"the more potential you see for it recasting the whole federal
system."

Leavitt says he has been thinking about one of the most routine,
ministerial functions of state government -- issuing driver's
licenses. "Until now, all we've had to do is to give an exam that
satisfies us that you are competent to operate a motor vehicle on the
roads of Utah. But now a driver's license has become a national
identity card. One of my aides went to the airport with an expired
driver's license and was not allowed to board the plane.

"Now the federal government wants us to be able to certify that if we
give you a driver's license, you really are who you say you are, you
live where you say you live and your birth date is what you claim it
is. Then the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] will get
involved, and insist that we determine you are in the country legally.
Pretty soon, our driver's license division has become a federal
agency."

Tom Ridge, the White House homeland security chief (soon to be head of
the new department), says he has sought to reassure Leavitt. "The
executive order of the president assigned the Office of Homeland
Security to develop a national strategy for safeguarding the country
-- not a federal strategy," Ridge says, "and that means we have a
strategic interest in developing and sustaining a working partnership
with state and local governments."

Still, Ridge says that as far as driver's licenses are concerned,
states should standardize the formats and procedures for issuing these
documents. "There ought to be a minimum set of standards for what has
become a standard form of identification."

Leavitt fears that "the need for coordination will almost inevitably
result in centralization." Ridge concedes that if states do not comply
voluntarily, a future Congress might threaten to withhold a portion of
the highway funds from the naysayers. "That is Plan B," he says.

A larger concern for Leavitt and other governors is that the need for
"inter-operability," the capacity of computer-driven information
systems to share records, will end up with Washington dictating what
equipment local sheriffs or police chiefs must install and what
portion of the data they must share. "If the systems all lead to some
computer in Washington, then local control is eroded," Leavitt says.

Ridge says there will be national standards for information systems --
"that is an important role for the department" -- but insists that
states and local governments want guidance on what to buy. "They will
still be doing the job. They are the first responders."

Leavitt says history argues otherwise. Welfare offices are local, he
says, but for 60 years -- until the reform of 1996 -- "the federal
government was really running them, because it set all the rules and
it furnished some of the money. The same thing could happen with
homeland security."

Already examples are cropping up of federal preemption of traditional
roles. Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that many local health
departments say they fear they will have to curtail services, such as
cancer and tuberculosis screening and children's dental examinations,
in order to meet the demands of Bush's federal smallpox vaccination
program.

There is a long history of Washington imposing its wishes on state and
local governments, through the rules it writes and the money it
distributes. But Republicans generally have resisted that tendency as
much as Democrats have embraced it.

Bush as a candidate gave few hints that he would be different or that
he would extend the authority of the federal government both at home
and overseas. But in all these areas -- from peacekeeping in Kabul to
school testing in Nebraska to health screening in Arizona -- the
length of his reach is overriding the conservative rhetoric of the
Bush presidency.

Big government is back -- with a Republican label.

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