The Contract with America in ten bills and what it taught about winning

Name the last campaign platform you read all the way through. Go ahead. I will wait.

Nobody can, and that is the whole story. Most party platforms are written by committees, adopted at conventions nobody watches and then filed away like the instruction manual for a toaster. Politicians get elected on a mood, a slogan or a bumper sticker, and then they are free to do whatever they like, because nothing they promised was specific enough to hold them to. So when 300-odd Republican candidates for the House gathered on the steps of the Capitol on September 27, 1994, and signed a single sheet of paper that said what they would do and when, that was not just good politics. It was a kind of heresy. They were giving voters a rope and inviting them to hang them with it.

It worked. In November 1994 Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, and the Contract with America became the most studied campaign document of the modern era. This post goes through what was in it, what happened to each piece, and what the whole experience taught about winning, and about governing, which turned out to be a different job.

What the Contract actually was

The Contract was the work of House Republican leaders, with Newt Gingrich of Georgia as the architect and Dick Armey of Texas as one of its principal drafters. It had two parts.

The first was a set of changes to how the House itself ran, to be adopted on the first day of the new Congress. Republicans promised to apply to Congress the laws that Congress passed for everyone else, to cut committee staff, to require a three-fifths vote to raise income tax rates, to limit committee chairmen's terms, and to open the books to an outside audit. A bill applying workplace and civil rights laws to Congress itself, the Congressional Accountability Act, was signed in January 1995.

The second was a promise: within the first 100 days, a House vote on ten bills. Not "pass them into law." A vote. That distinction matters, and I will come back to it. Here are the ten, by their titles:

1. The Fiscal Responsibility Act, a balanced budget amendment and a line-item veto.
2. The Taking Back Our Streets Act, on crime.
3. The Personal Responsibility Act, on welfare.
4. The Family Reinforcement Act, on child support and family protections.
5. The American Dream Restoration Act, tax relief for families, including a child tax credit.
6. The National Security Restoration Act, on defense and the United Nations.
7. The Senior Citizens Fairness Act, on Social Security and retirement.
8. The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act, on small business and capital gains.
9. The Common Sense Legal Reforms Act, on lawsuit reform.
10. The Citizen Legislature Act, term limits for members of Congress.

I am describing the subjects in general terms because the details changed in the legislative process, and I would rather you check the final text on Congress.gov than trust my memory of every provision. What matters is the structure: ten bills, each with a name a voter could repeat, each on a topic the party's candidates had been hearing about for months.

Why it was smart

Let me make the argument for the Contract's design, because it is rarer than you think.

One, it was specific. A voter could look at "balanced budget amendment" and know what it meant. A promise to "restore fiscal discipline" is a promise that can never be broken because it never meant anything.

Two, it was checkable. Candidates signed it. The 100-day clock was public. When April came, anyone could count which bills had received votes.

Three, it was limited. Ten items, all drawn from topics that polling and the candidates' own town halls suggested the public cared about. It left off the issues that divided Republicans internally. Social issues like abortion were famously not in it, which let candidates from very different districts sign the same page. A platform that tries to resolve every internal argument ends up resolving none.

Four, it nationalized the election. Midterm elections are usually a hundred separate local races. The Contract gave 300 candidates a shared script and the press a single story to tell. That is how a party turns a swing into a wave.

Now, the objection. Critics said the Contract was a gimmick: a marketing exercise dressed up as a governing program. There is something to that. It was marketing. But the marketing was in service of a real commitment, and the proof is that the House followed through. Within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, which began in January 1995, the House voted on every item. Nine of the ten passed the House. The tenth, term limits, got a vote and failed, because a constitutional amendment needs a two-thirds majority and it did not get one. A party that holds the vote on the item it expects to lose has done exactly what it said. You may argue about the merits of the bills. You cannot argue that Gingrich's House broke its word on the timetable.

Where the Contract ran into the Senate

Here is the part the cheerleaders skip. Passing a bill in the House is step one of a long staircase.

The balanced budget amendment passed the House in January 1995, but in the Senate in March 1995 it fell short of the 67 votes needed for a constitutional amendment. (Two-thirds of 100 is 66.67, and you cannot have two-thirds of a senator, so the number is 67.) It came back for another try in 1997, and that one is the one people remember as falling a single vote short. Either way, the lesson is the same: a constitutional amendment needs support from many members of the other party, and Republicans in the 1990s had a Senate majority but not a supermajority.

Several other pieces did not become law in the form the House passed them. Legal reform, term limits and some of the tax package died in the Senate or at the White House. The line-item veto did become law, in 1996, and was then struck down by the Supreme Court in 1998 in Clinton v. City of New York, which held that the Constitution does not let the President cancel parts of a bill after signing it. You can see why constitutional lawyers had warned that the structure was shaky. If you want to understand the wall that stopped it, A Five-Question Constitutional Test You Can Run on Any Federal Law gives you the questions to ask of any such law.

A few things did become law. The Congressional Accountability Act came in January 1995. The Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, which limited Washington's ability to dump costs on state and local governments without a hearing, was signed in March 1995. And most important, the welfare overhaul got there eventually.

The shutdowns

When Republicans and President Bill Clinton could not agree on a budget, the government closed twice: a five-day shutdown in November 1995 and a longer one, about three weeks, from December 1995 into early January 1996. The Republican theory was that Clinton would blink. He did not, and public opinion largely blamed the party that controlled Congress. That is a judgment I am not going to defend as fair, only to report. A fuller timeline is in The 1995 and 1996 Government Shutdowns in Dated Steps and the Lessons Learned, and what a government shutdown really shuts down and who gets paid explains what a shutdown really does and does not stop.

The lesson of the shutdowns is simple and painful: you do not win a showdown by announcing that you will win it. You win it by having the votes to override a veto, or by having the public already on your side. Republicans in 1995 had neither. They had a position that polled well in the abstract and collapsed the minute the Park Service closed the gates.

What eventually passed

Here is the redemption arc, and it is important. In 1996 Congress sent welfare reform to Clinton. He had vetoed two earlier versions, but the third, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, he signed on August 22, 1996. It ended the old entitlement structure for cash welfare, replacing it with block grants to states, work requirements and time limits. A big portion of the original Contract's welfare idea survived, and the person who signed it was a Democratic president running for re-election. You can read the full story of that deal in divided government gave us welfare reform and a balanced budget, and the state-level experiments that paved the way in How the States Rewrote Welfare Before Washington Finally Caught Up.

In 1997 came the Balanced Budget Act, signed in August, together with a tax bill that included a child tax credit, one of the Contract's signature ideas. Within a few years the federal budget went from deficit to surplus. How much credit belongs to the Contract, how much to a booming economy and how much to a President who agreed to spending restraint is something economists still argue about, and I will not pretend to settle it in a paragraph. What I can say is that two sides who disagreed deeply produced a budget agreement, which is how the system is supposed to work. For the moral argument behind that goal, read A Balanced Budget Is a Moral Argument Before It Is an Accounting One.

Scoring the ten, in one table

If you want a quick scorecard, here is how the big themes fared. I am sorting by outcome in general terms, and you should confirm any detail on Congress.gov before you quote it.

Read that table the way a coach reads a game film. The party scored on the pieces where the other side had its own reasons to cooperate (welfare, a family tax credit, a budget deal), and it stalled on the pieces that asked the other side to give up power or to accept a constitutional change. That pattern is not an accident. It is how a divided government sorts proposals. Ask of any promise: what does the other party get out of this? If the answer is nothing, the promise is a campaign line, not a program.

The end of the speaker

The Contract made Gingrich a historic figure, and it also made him the face of every Republican setback. He became Speaker in January 1995. After the 1998 midterms, when Republicans lost House seats instead of gaining them, he announced his resignation as Speaker, and he left Congress in January 1999. A man who had been called the architect of a revolution was gone, in part because the movement he led had grown restless at the pace of change and the cost of confrontation.

I do not offer that as a moral. I offer it as an observation about political capital: it is made of promises kept and trust earned, it is spent by every fight you pick, and it is not renewable on demand.

What it taught about winning

Let me lay out the argument in numbered premises.

Premise one: voters reward parties that tell them what they will do. The Contract gave a minority party a reason to be chosen instead of merely a reason to be angry at the other side.

Premise two: a promise must be one you control. The House could promise votes, and it kept the promise. It could not promise outcomes in the Senate or at the White House, and so it should not have promised them. Candidates who said "we will balance the budget" were making a promise the structure of government did not let them keep alone.

Premise three: winning the House is not winning the government. The Founders built a system in which each of three actors can block the other two. If you hold one-half of one-third of the machinery, you can set the agenda and you can stop things. You cannot rule. How a Bill Really Becomes Law, Including the Steps Schoolhouse Rock Skipped walks through why.

Premise four: therefore the way to turn a platform into law is to choose the pieces that the other side can accept, and to be ready to take 60 percent of what you wanted rather than shut down the government for 100 percent. Welfare reform in 1996 is the model. Shutdown theater in 1995 is the warning.

Does that mean compromise is always right? No, and the argument I just made has a limit. Some principles are worth losing over. The test is whether you are losing in a way that moves the country toward your goal over time or in a way that sets it back. A shutdown with no votes and no public support moves the country the wrong way. A narrow compromise that gets a work requirement into law moves it the right way.

The bottom line

• The Contract with America worked because it was specific, short and checkable. Ask any candidate you support to put a promise on paper that you can check later.
• A vote is not a law. Know what a candidate can actually deliver from the office they are running for.
• Divided government can still produce big results, as welfare reform in 1996 and the 1997 budget deal showed.
• A showdown without the votes or the public behind you is a loss dressed up as a stand.
• Read the text of any bill yourself on Congress.gov before you cheer or boo it.