The 1994 Contract With America and the End of Forty Years of House Rule

On September 27, 1994, on the west front of the United States Capitol, more than three hundred Republican candidates for the House of Representatives stood on the steps in a crowd and signed a piece of paper. It was a plain document with a plain title. It listed what they would bring to a vote in the first hundred days if the voters gave them a majority. And then they did something that sounds ordinary and was then nearly unheard of: they asked voters to hold them to it.

A little over six weeks later, the voters gave them the House. It was the first Republican majority in that chamber in forty years.

I want to tell you how that happened and why it still matters, because the Contract with America is one of the most misunderstood episodes in modern politics. Some people remember it as a manifesto that changed everything. Others remember it as a brochure nobody read. Both are partly right. The truth is more useful than either legend, and if you work in a campaign, a county party or a state house, there are lessons here you can use on Monday.

Forty years in the minority

Start with the scale of the drought. Republicans had controlled the House of Representatives for the two years from 1953 to 1955, and not again until 1995. That is four decades. Think about what it does to a party: whole careers spent in the minority, a culture of complaining rather than governing, and a Democratic majority that had come to think of the chamber as its permanent property.

By the early 1990s there was plenty to be angry about. The House had its own scandals, including one involving a bank for members that allowed overdrafts without penalty, and a Post Office controversy. There was frustration over a tax increase in 1993 passed without a single Republican vote, and over the failure of the Clinton health care plan, which many voters saw as a symbol of Washington overreach. And a group of Republicans led by Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the party's whip, had been building a strategy for years: stop being the polite minority and become an alternative.

The idea of the Contract grew out of that strategy. Instead of 435 separate campaigns with 435 separate messages, Republicans would run on one list, in the language of ordinary people, with a promise to vote on every item early. The campaign was run with the help of pollsters and consultants, including Frank Luntz, but the content was a short statement of commitments, written to be understood.

What the Contract promised

The Contract had two parts. The first was a set of rules changes that the new majority would adopt on its first day. These included:

1. A full audit of the House's books by an outside accountant.
2. Cutting the number of committees and cutting committee staff by about a third.
3. Banning proxy voting in committees.
4. Requiring a three-fifths vote of the House to raise income tax rates.
5. Limiting the terms of committee chairmen.
6. Opening committee meetings to the public.
7. And applying to Congress the laws it passed for everyone else, the subject of a bill called the Congressional Accountability Act.

The second part was ten bills that Republicans promised to bring to a vote within the first hundred days of the new Congress:

1. Fiscal Responsibility Act. A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and a line-item veto.
2. Taking Back Our Streets Act. An anti-crime package.
3. Personal Responsibility Act. Welfare reform.
4. Family Reinforcement Act. Child support enforcement and tax incentives for adoption and elder care.
5. American Dream Restoration Act. A $500-per-child tax credit and tax relief for married couples.
6. National Security Restoration Act. Limits on the use of American troops under United Nations command and a stronger defense.
7. Senior Citizens Fairness Act. Changes to the Social Security earnings test and other benefits for seniors.
8. Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act. Tax and regulatory relief for small business.
9. Common Sense Legal Reform Act. Changes to lawsuit rules.
10. Citizen Legislature Act. Term limits for members of Congress.

Notice what is not on the list: a promise to pass anything. The Contract promised votes. It did not promise outcomes, since a House majority cannot pass a bill into law on its own. That distinction turned out to be the single most important feature of the document, because it was a promise Republicans could keep. Our companion post, The Contract with America in ten bills and what it taught about winning, goes through the ten bills one at a time.

The election

November 8, 1994 delivered a result that very few predicted. Republicans gained 54 seats in the House and won control of the chamber for the first time since the 1952 election, as well as eight seats in the Senate and a majority there as well. They also did well in governors' races. The sitting Speaker, Tom Foley of Washington, lost his own seat. In January 1995 Gingrich became Speaker.

How much of that was the Contract? Be careful. Surveys taken at the time suggested that most voters had not read it and many had never heard of it. A good deal of the 1994 result came from other forces: dissatisfaction with the new Democratic administration, the collapse of its health care plan, the 1993 tax increase, retirements among Democrats in the South and a long accumulation of resentment against the way Congress did business. The Contract did not make the wave. What it did was give the wave a direction, and give Republican candidates a common script that made them look like a team and not a crowd of individuals.

Here's my conclusion on that. The Contract mattered more to the candidates than to the voters. It gave them a message and a common standard, and it let the national party nationalize a midterm. That is a real contribution, even if it is not the one that the legend claims.

The first hundred days

Now we get to the part that surprises the cynics. The new House did exactly what it said it would.

On the first day, January 4, 1995, it adopted the rules changes. Within about three months it held a floor vote on every one of the ten items. The last votes came by early April, inside the hundred-day window. The Congressional Accountability Act, which applied workplace laws to Congress, was signed in January. An unfunded mandates law, limiting Washington's practice of imposing costs on states without paying for them, was signed in March.

The House passed nine of the ten; the term limits amendment was the one that failed. But passing the House is only the first step.

Where the Contract stalled

Several items died in the Senate, which was run by a different set of rules and a Democratic President who held a veto. These are worth knowing about.

The balanced budget amendment. The House passed it in January 1995 by a vote of 300 to 132, which cleared the two-thirds threshold of 290. In the Senate, a constitutional amendment also needs two-thirds, which is 67 votes. It fell short in March 1995, by one vote by the usual count. (The recorded tally was 65 to 35, because Majority Leader Bob Dole voted no for procedural reasons so that he could ask for a second vote later.) Do the arithmetic, since it matters: 67 needed, 66 in favor in the real count, one short. In 1997 the Senate tried again and fell one vote short again, 66 to 34.

Term limits. The constitutional amendment for term limits failed in the House in March 1995, well short of the two-thirds it needed. It surprised few people that many members of Congress were reluctant to vote for a measure ending their own careers, and the failure shows how hard it is to change the structure of an institution from the inside.

Tax cuts. The $500-per-child credit passed the House in 1995 and went into the Republican budget, which President Clinton vetoed. The credit became law only in 1997, in the Taxpayer Relief Act, and a version of the credit has grown many times since, as we trace in the child tax credit from $400 to $2,000, told bill by bill.

The legal reform and some other provisions. Some passed into law in part, often after bargaining with the White House, and some did not pass at all.

So the Contract's scorecard is mixed. Much of it never became law. But several things did, sometimes years later: the line-item veto in 1996, which the Supreme Court then struck down in 1998; welfare reform, which Clinton vetoed twice before signing a revised version in August 1996; the balanced budget agreement of 1997; and the tax credit. A fair reading is that the Contract set the agenda for a decade, even where it did not write the laws.

The strongest objection

Here is the critic's best argument. The Contract, the critic says, was a marketing exercise. It cherry-picked popular items. It avoided the hard questions, such as what to do about Social Security and Medicare. It promised a balanced budget without saying which programs would be cut. And it produced a Congress that picked a series of confrontations with the president that damaged the party. (We cover the sharpest of those in The 1995 and 1996 Government Shutdowns in Dated Steps and the Lessons Learned.)

Some of this is fair. The Contract was a campaign document. It was designed to unite candidates around popular ideas, and it left out the divisive ones, which were precisely the ones that mattered most for the budget. A document that promises a balanced budget amendment and tax cuts while leaving Social Security and Medicare alone will have trouble explaining how the numbers add up. The 1995 fights were what happened when the numbers met the politics.

But here is the response. First, a campaign document is allowed to be a campaign document. The alternative was 435 different promises with no accountability at all. Second, the Contract's central achievement was not any one bill. It was the idea that a party could tell voters in advance what it would vote on, and then do it. That is a form of honesty, and it is rarer than it should be. Third, the Republican majority that came out of 1994 did go on to balance the federal budget, working with Clinton, in the late 1990s, which our post on divided government gave us welfare reform and a balanced budget explains.

What governing majorities have learned since

Here are five lessons I'd take from the Contract, in the order of how often they get forgotten.

1. Promise votes, not outcomes. A majority controls its own floor. It does not control the Senate, the President or the courts. The Contract kept faith because it promised only what the House could deliver.
2. Keep the list short. Ten items could be remembered. A fifty-page platform cannot. The shortness was the strength.
3. Know the veto. If the other party holds the White House, the real work is negotiating. Plan for the bargain, not just the vote. Czar Reed's story in Czar Reed and the House rule that ended the disappearing quorum is a reminder of how much power rules give a majority, and how much they don't.
4. Do the housekeeping first. The rules changes on day one, such as applying the laws to Congress, were the easiest things to keep and the best at building trust.
5. A mandate is borrowed. The House majority held through the 1996 and 1998 elections, but not on a blank check. Voters judged what the majority did with the power. Gingrich resigned as Speaker after the 1998 elections.

Both parties have tried versions of the idea since. Republicans tried a document called the Pledge to America in 2010, and we cover that wave in The Tea Party Wave of 2010 Explained from Santelli to the Statehouses. The lesson is the same each time. A short list with a clear promise gets attention. Keeping it gets respect.

How this applies to you

If you are running for a school board, a county commission or a legislative seat, copy the structure. Write down five things you will bring to a vote in your first hundred days. Make them things you can actually vote on. Put them in front of voters in plain language. And then, when you win, vote on them in public, even if you lose. Voters forgive a loss on a clear vote far more readily than a fuzzy one.

The bottom line

• The Contract with America was signed on September 27, 1994 by more than three hundred candidates, and it promised votes on ten bills in the first hundred days, not final passage.
• Republicans gained 54 House seats that November and took the House for the first time in forty years. The Contract gave the wave a direction, but it did not create it.
• Several items died or stalled: the balanced budget amendment fell one vote short in the Senate by the usual count, and term limits failed in the House. Others, such as welfare reform and the child tax credit, became law later.
• The core lesson holds for any campaign: make a short promise you can keep, tell voters in advance, and then do it in public.
• Read the Contract's text yourself and compare it with what was enacted on Congress.gov. You'll find it a useful template for holding any candidate accountable.