GOP NEEDS TO ADDRESS ISSUES IN CONGRESS

These aren't exactly salad days for congressional Republicans, in the majority now for their fifth straight year and facing next year's all-important, winner-take-all elections. In 2000, unlike any recent American election, all three branches of the federal government are on the line. Obviously, there's a presidential election and another for control of the House and Senate. And on the outcome of these races will hinge control of the Supreme Court well into the new millenium. At least three justices on that court are thought to be likely to be nearing retirement during the next presidential term.

Begin with the narrowness of the GOP House majority, one of the slimmest in history: 223-211, plus one independent/socialist who votes with the Democrats. The effective meaning of this is that any day six Republicans get up and decide to buck their party's leadership on any issue, Speaker Dennis Hastert has a serious problem.

This very slimness of the margin now bedeviling them can be said to issue from the lack of a positive issue agenda in last year's midterm elections. Under previous Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had proved so brilliant an insurgent leader while the GOP was in the minority, House Republicans seemed to lose their way. When the Clinton White House found itself mired in last year's Monica Lewinsky scandal, House GOP leaders seemed to think all they had to do was run out the clock, sit on a lead, enact no major reforms and wait for the votes to swell their ranks. They were wrong. Exit polls showed that millions of the conservative voters who gave Republicans their majority in 1994 sat it out in 1998, disheartened at the lack of progress on issues they cared about.

Still, American voters returned a GOP majority, voting slightly over 50 percent for Republican candidates for Congress. With that majority comes responsibility to act on the issues that resonate so strongly with Americans whenever they hear them ably articulated. Among these should be found:

Across-the-board tax cuts which, despite much media noise, are still hugely popular with Americans. A constitutional amendment requiring a super majority before taxes can be raised. The beginning of real Social Security reform, including new options for those who choose to place some of their contributions in market instruments rather than in the current, government-run Ponzi scheme. A real military buildup, sustained for years, to reconstruct the hollow military into which the Clinton administration has allowed our once-magnificent forces to slide. Convening serious, public hearings into the scandal over the Clinton administration's intelligence and security failures vis-a-vis Chinese espionage.

For positive examples congressional Republicans can look to the successful governors who are their party's pride and joy. Almost to a man or woman, from New York and New Jersey to Michigan and Wisconsin to Texas, they are successful tax cutters -- some of them more than two dozen times this decade. Texas Gov. George W. Bush has just won passage of a nearly $2 billion tax cut. His brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in his first legislative session, has begun freeing our schools from the teachers-union monopoly by winning passage of the nation's first statewide school choice program. Most of the successful reforming of welfare has occurred on the watches of Republican governors.

These examples demonstrate yet again that fortune favors the bold. For a generation now, American voters have increasingly recognized the Democratic Party as a backward-looking coalition dominated by trial lawyers and public-employee unions and led by the hard left that still commands their House and Senate leadership. This isn't the future most Americans want, but the old adage is right: You can't beat something with nothing. House and Senate Republican leaders had better get a grip or prepare to return, next year, to their long-accustomed role as spectators in the minority.