Darwinian politics.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

Survival instincts of "citizen legislators"

Commenting on the Republican minimum-wage rout, House Majority Leader Dick Armey quoted "The Bug," the Dire Straits song made popular by Mary Chapin Carpenter: "'Sometimes you're the windshield. Sometimes you're the bug,'" he said. "We've been the bug the past few days."

In a roundabout way, Armey was admitting that he and other House opponents of the wage hike were rolled: by Speaker Newt Gingrich, who argued that he would not stand in the way of a policy supported by 80 percent of the public; by nine Republican committee chairmen who voted for the hike; and, most surprisingly, by a disturbing number of the supposedly radical freshmen and sophomores, who provided 46 of the 93 Republican votes in favor of a higher minimum wage.

Beltway conventional wisdom has portrayed these short-timers as rabid anti-statists. The freshmen and sophomores have also been praised by the advocates of congressional term limits, who claim that such "citizen legislators" would set aside parochial interests or concerns about their own re-election campaigns and vote against the expansion of the regulatory state. The minimum-wage vote certainly casts further doubt on the Republicans' willingness to restrain federal power. But it also suggests that a legislator's tenure in office may have little bearing on that person's attitudes about the size and scope of government.

If House Republicans were serious about reducing the intrusiveness of the federal government, voting against a minimum-wage hike should have been a no-brainer. Any minimum wage impedes the freedom of employers and employees to enter contracts without the government's interference. When 40 percent of House Republicans vote to expand government power, how can the party credibly argue that electing more GOP legislators will roll back the regulatory state?

Gingrich's aversion to taking political risks will remain a headache for Armey and the limited-government wing of the GOP no matter how the party does this fall. In the near term, though, the capitulation of the freshmen appears harder to explain.

Elsewhere in this issue, Cato Institute President Ed Crane makes a common argument when he says, "Americans clearly desire less government - much less. The single strongest piece of evidence for that proposition is that 80 percent of them support term limits.... The common sense of a citizen legislature would give us Medical Savings Accounts, privatized Social...