Romney and Giuliani

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At Tuesday's Republican presidential debate in Dearborn, Mich., home of Ford Motor Co., the once-thriving automaker that lost $12.7 billion last year (the fifth year of the Bush expansion), rhetorical fireworks erupted between the two Republican front-runners — former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who leads in the national polls, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who leads in Iowa and New Hampshire. Both candidates battled over their tax and spending records.

On the spending front, Mr. Giuliani charged that "under Governor Romney, spending went up in Massachusetts per capita by 8 percent; under me spending went down by 7 percent." Mr. Romney immediately countered, citing analysis by the Club for Growth, whose anti-spending and anti-tax credentials are impeccable. "They said my spending grew 2.2 percent a year," Mr. Romney declared, adding, "Yours grew 2.8 percent a year." Indeed, the Club for Growth concluded that Mr. Romney's spending record "comes out more positive than negative, especially when one considers that average spending increased only 2.22 percent over his four years, well below the population-plus-inflation benchmark of nearly 3 percent." For Mr. Giuliani, the Club for Growth reported: "Over his eight years, city spending increased just barely, by an average of 2.84 percent — a remarkable number given the 2.9 percent population-plus-inflation benchmark." Mr. Romney won this round.

Mr. Romney attacked Mr. Giuliani for leading the charge to the Supreme Court to have the line-item veto declared unconstitutional in 1998. Mr. Giuliani replied that he was merely acting as a "strict constructionist." But it's a little more complicated than that.

An integral part of Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America," which propelled Republicans to majority status in the House for the first time in 40 years, the line-item veto was overwhelmingly approved by Republicans in both chambers in 1996: 221 out of 224 in the House and 50 out of 53 in the Senate. Bill Clinton courageously used his line-item authority to strike about $200 million worth of Medicaid pork heading for New York City hospitals. Then-Mayor Giuliani sued and won a 6-3 Supreme Court decision whose majority opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, hardly a "strict constructionist." (If Justice Stevens, arguably the court's most liberal member, is Mr. Giuliani's idea of the kind of "strict constructionists" he would appoint to the court as president, conservatives will be as dismayed as they have become after President Ford appointed Justice Stevens and President George H.W. Bush appointed David Souter.)

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia, a strict constructionist, wrote: "There's not a dime's worth of difference between Congress's authorizing the president to cancel a spending item, and Congress's authorizing money to be spent on a particular item at the president's discretion." Justice Scalia declared that the title of the Line Item Veto Act "succeeded in faking out the Supreme Court."

Mr. Giuliani repeated his claim that he "cut taxes 23 times when I was mayor of New York." It turns out that many of those cuts were instigated by Republican Gov. George Pataki and the state legislature. One of several glaring flaws in Mr. Giuliani's record on taxes was, as the Club for Growth says, his 1994 "opposition to Republican [gubernatorial] candidate George Pataki's proposed cut in the state income tax," whose rates were among the highest in the country. Also worth noting is the fact that Mr. Giuliani opposed the candidacy of Mr. Pataki in 1994. Instead, the mayor vigorously supported the re-election of three-term Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo, another pro-choice Catholic who is widely regarded as one of the most liberal governors in the nation's history.

Asked to identify "the greatest long-term threat to the U.S. economy," Mr. Romney delivered perhaps his most disappointing response to an economic question. "Our sense of optimism," he incongruously replied. Even more inexplicable was Mr. Giuliani's repeated assertion — delivered on three separate occasions — that America's primary export to China should be "energy independence." Where did that come from? With less than 5 percent of the world's population and about 1.5 percent of the world's oil reserves, the United States consumes 25 percent of the planet's petroleum products each year. We import 13.6 million barrels of petroleum each day, representing two-thirds of our consumption. Indeed, we have allowed our dependency on foreign petroleum supplies, both in absolute and proportionate terms, to virtually double since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, when the United States imported 6.3 million barrels, or 36 percent of its consumption.

What is Mr. Giuliani talking about? Does he plan to export energy independence to China? For three-and-a-half decades, we have consistently failed, notwithstanding innumerable presidential pledges, to even remotely approach it here.