Living Politics: President Bush's War At Home

Iraq isn't the only place where George W. Bush must unify warring tribes. He has the same mission on Capitol Hill--inside his own Republican Party.

Ending the growing feud between the militant armies of Sheik Tom DeLay in the House and the Senate's more moderate Bill Frist Front is crucial to the president's re-election. Why? Because the GOP "runs" Congress, and Bush won't be able to blame the Hill if he has few legislative achievements to call his own.

When legislators went home for the Easter-Passover recess, they left behind a battlefield littered with the casualties of friendly Republican fire. Specifically, I'm told, DeLay and other House GOP leaders are attacking (behind the scenes) what they increasingly see as an inept--and a way too accommodationist--command structure in the Senate. The main beefs: that Senate Leader Frist hasn't pushed through the president's most conservative judicial nominees (Miguel Estrada in particular); that Frist was unable to end the ban on oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and that he allowed (and was maybe even was complicit in) a Senate decision to whack the president's $726 billion tax cut in half.

Much of the anti-Frist squawking is predictable, and not really fair. Unlike the House, where the rules allow even leaders with thin margins to run things in dictatorial fashion, the Senate is designed to be a nearly ungovernable mess. An iron fist often requires 60 votes, and even a "simple" majority is hard to corral when, as is now the case, the GOP has only 51. Subtracting for a party-within-a-party--three semi-liberals from New England (last remnants of the "Rockefeller Wing")--Frist only has 48 votes to work with on any given day.

But the new tribal warfare is about more than rules and numbers. Part of the enmity stems from the way Frist came to power, as the result of what true-blue conservatives saw as a media-driven putsch against the former Senate GOP leader, Trent Lott. Remember him? He was drummed out of the leadership (with the tacit support of the White House) for having waxed nostalgic about the segregationist days of Strom Thurmond's political career. Frist was seen by some as a little too hungry to take advantage of the Lott fiasco.

Frist, one of the hardest-working men in Washington, has done his best to overcome that start, meeting regularly with members to hear their concerns. The scion of a powerful family in Nashville, Tenn., he's painfully polite in manner. But he's also spent 20 years as a leading heart-and-lung transplant surgeon, and became used to giving orders that others--as a matter of life and death--were expected to carry out instantly. Things rarely happen instantly in the Senate.

Oddly enough, there seems to be a class element at work, too. The House leaders--Majority Leader DeLay and Speaker Dennis Hastert--are blue-collar types, and proud of it. DeLay in particular sees himself as representing antielites, the New South, evangelical Christians in his hometown of Houston. They don't say it in so many words, but the House guys are suspicious of Frist, whose family wealth (from managed-health-care systems) is enormous and who was schooled up East at Princeton and the Harvard Medical School.

Why they should hold that background against Frist--and not President Bush, who came to power by way of Andover, Yale and the Harvard Business School--isn't quite clear. One reason is that Bush has a common touch that Frist has never had the chance (or bothered to) develop. The president also spent six years as governor of Texas. No airs possible there.

Frist's work on the stem-cell research issue in 2001 fueled the hard-liners' suspicions. A doctor and scientist, he floated his own compromise on the topic in advance of Bush's. Though Frist's ideas were considered harshly conservative by pro-choice forces, the fact that he sought a scientific middle ground (akin to the one Bush eventually reached) didn't sit well with GOP jihadists: he had nudged the president in a direction they didn't want him to go.

Now comes the tax debate. The Senate has always been more skeptical of the president's $726 billion plan than the House, which passed it more or less as is. In a complicated procedural move, Frist last month was able to get the Senate to preliminarily approve a measure authorizing a tax cut of between $350 billion and $550 billion. But in the secret maneuvering that followed, three GOP senators--Snowe of Maine, Voinovich of Ohio and Grassley of Iowa--banded together to insist that only the lower figure would apply.

House leaders insist--and Frist's aides deny--that the Senate leadership knew about this maneuver and may have tacitly approved of it. DeLay & Co. were furious. "The House, and the White House were completely blindsided," a top administration official told me. "To say that everyone was angry is an understatement." Conservatives blame not only Frist, but his lieutenant (and former rival for the top job) Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma.

Now it's up to Bush to undo the deal. The arithmetic is such that, without a bill worth at least $550 billion, he won't be able to win the centerpiece of his plan, an end to taxation of stock dividends. He made an opening bid this week, declaring in public that only the higher number would be acceptable. He'll have to follow that with some individual lobbying, which shouldn't be impossible for a president with a 70 percent approval rating. It's not clear what carrots and sticks he'll use. Sending in Tommy Franks presumably isn't an option.