The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

192 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
of the United States on the basis of defense or discretionary programs.”
Even though 1984 was going to be an election year, Gorton insisted that
any serious deficit-reduction program had to deal with entitlements. 9
goRton’s gRowing ReputAtion As a deficit hawk was cemented in 1984
by the hand-to-hand combat, on all flanks, over the Fiscal Year 1985 budget.
Gorton, Kassebaum and Grassley “favored debate in order to forge
consensus on bigger defense reductions; yet they feared delay even more,
endangering the Finance Committee bill, given their conservative colleagues’
suspicions. Moderate Republicans and Democrats wanted quick
action as well because the financial markets were getting skittish,” Joseph
White and Aaron Wildavsky write in The Deficit and the Public Interest,
their compelling analysis of the 1980s budget wars. But delay there
was, as filibuster threats, recriminations and internecine squabbling over
a deficit-reduction package created gridlock. The Republican-controlled
Senate nearly handed the White House a major defeat when a budget
proposed by Democrats came within a vote of passage. 10
Gorton’s new compromise plan put him at odds with his friend Domenici,
as well as senior citizens and federal pensioners—in an election
year no less. Slade wanted to attack the $200 billion-and-still-climbing
deficit with an assortment of tax hikes and by limiting increases in Social
Security and federal and military retiree benefits to 3 percent below the
rate of inflation. The Pentagon would get a 5 percent real-growth boost.
In an emotion-charged debate on May 8, 1984, fellow Republicans attacked
Gorton’s plan. Domenici warned that cutting Social Security
would put the burden of deficit reduction on “a lot of people who are hurting
in this country. . . . [T]his is a $28.5 billion reduction in Social Security,
$2.8 billion in reduction for military retirees, $3.5 billion in civil servants.”
Gorton countered that it was time to be “more daring,” time to
face the fact that reining in the entitlements represented the only way to
make a significant dent in the deficit. The next day, his plan crashed and
burned, 72-23, mustering support only from Dan Evans and a few other
Republican moderates. “It was in the middle, crushed by two extremes.
Ironically, this is almost certainly a precursor of what is going to happen
next year,” Gorton predicted. The irony was that there was so little risk
he’d be proved wrong. 11
in the MiddLe of the Budget iMpLosion, Gorton ensnared himself in
another white-hot issue—school prayer.
Ronald Reagan was operating at the peak of his conservative avuncu-