Republican Tensions Flare in the Open

President Bush made a rare visit to the Capitol last week for a closed meeting with his Republican colleagues. Upon his entrance, carefully recorded by cameras and microphones, Bush was flanked by House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. It was a show of Republican unity, in a time of public discord.

It was not the first time the president has come to the Hill to rally his troops, but it was the first time his doing so had seemed so defensive.

Since the Republican Party firmed up its control of the White House and both chambers of Congress with the elections of 2002, the political and policy message emanating from the heights of power in Washington has been closely controlled and coordinated. It is only in the last several weeks, with rising doubts about Iraq and rebellion on the budget deficit among Republicans in Congress, that the Bush administration has lost control over that message.

The friction between Republicans reached a new intensity last week, when Senate Majority Leader Frist was forced to postpone a Senate vote on the federal budget. Earlier in the week, House and Senate negotiators reached a budget compromise they said would hold down the ballooning federal deficit. The agreement would put controls on spending and some tax cuts for one year, while allowing Republican leaders to extend several tax cuts that had been set to expire.

Fiscal conservatives, notably Arizona Sen. John McCain, were not happy with this. They say the budget compromise does not do enough to rein in deficit spending. McCain and others hold that so long as the United States is fighting a war, lawmakers should do whatever it takes to keep the federal budget healthy.

That caused so much animosity among Republicans that when a reporter asked House Speaker Hastert last week about McCain's view, Hastert sarcastically replied "Who? Where's he from?" And when that reporter responded that McCain is a Republican from Arizona, Hastert retorted, "A Republican?"

Hastert elaborated on why he thought the compromise-budget is fair, asserting that its spending will keep the U.S. military strong while its tax cuts bolster the economy.

Hastert's remarks drew an almost immediate response from McCain: "I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility," McCain said in a statement. "Apparently those days are long gone for some in our party."

This hot exchange was only the latest in a rash of intra-party squabbling -- unusual for Republicans in general but particularly notable in an election year. Last week, the two Republican chairmen of the Armed Services committees -- in the House California's Duncan Hunter, and in the Senate Virginia's John Warner -- exchanged fire over the recent public hearings in the Senate looking into the Iraq war. Warner has called several of President Bush's leading officials and military top brass to respond to often harsh questioning from Republicans and Democrats alike on his committee. Hunter criticized those hearings this week, specifically for "jerking out" combat commanders from the field to the detriment of the war effort.

Warner immediately fired back, releasing an earlier letter he'd written to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting that hearings with force commanders be conducted over video-teleconference. Warner told reporters that the Pentagon informed him the most recent witnesses before his committee -- including the head of Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid -- would be in the United States anyway.

Disagreements are not uncommon among same-party committee chairs in Congress, whichever party holds power. Rivalry and even rancor is more the rule than the exception in House-Senate relations, and mixing in the White House often tends to exacerbate these tensions. Moreover, the conflicts on display this month have roots in longstanding differences between the chambers and between the regional and ideological factions of the Republican Party.

What makes these conflicts different and newsworthy all of a sudden is that they are flaring in the open, and with an air of anxiety quite unlike the cool confidence with which Republicans are more comfortable. The current lineup of Republican leaders atop the Senate and House is especially devoted to acting with assurance. But it's been plain in recent days that this same leadership was not anticipating a spring of such awful news from Iraq, a run of bad turns that has distracted the nation from an improving economy and dampened GOP expectations for November.

So it was that a presidential visit to the Hill designed to lift everyone's spirits ended with little sense of joy or relief. The leaders went quickly to the microphones to tell reporters how well the session had gone, but the look in their eyes did not match the smiles on their lips.