June 25, 2000

GOP lets chance to win votes evaporate

When gasoline prices first spiked a few months ago, a band of conservative House Republicans figured a ripe opportunity had arrived to dump a nickel's worth of federal gasoline taxes. They figured wrong.

Their fear-filled leaders stopped the effort cold, declaring that the federal government couldn't afford to give up the tax dollars, which were enacted at President Clinton's suggestion by a Democrat-controlled Congress. This week, the governor of Indiana declared an "energy emergency" in response to gas prices pushing $3 a gallon &emdash; and suspended his state's gasoline tax.

No wonder Mencken called the GOP the "Stupid Party." The federal treasury is absolutely swimming in cash, so much dough that even Congress hasn't figured out how to spend it all. The latest projection has the tax surplus growing to $1 trillion in a few years. Yes, one trillion, with a capital "T."

And that stands for political trouble for flat-footed Republicans. In parts of the Midwest, working people literally are having to choose between dinner on the table and gas in the car to get to work. Yet there it is, on videotape, Republicans glowing like a bunch of IRS agents, saying the government can't let go of a nickel a gallon. A nickel.

Even if the GOP were correct about the tax economics &emdash; they're not &emdash; given the gas price situation, in the annals of political stupidity their resistance to cutting gas taxes has to rank up there with Jimmy Carter's infamous "national malaise" speech. And to top it off, they've been trumped by a liberal Democrat.

H.L. Mencken, phone home.