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Mark McGwire's tremendous accomplishment has put baseball back on top as the great American game. Wouldn't it be great if the Republican Congress stepped up to the bat and hit a few home runs?

Those who call themselves the Republican "leadership" in Congress seem to be just standing around waiting for Monicagate to hand them election victories in November. "Let's wait for the Starr report" is their mantra.

Bill Clinton (who is only sorry that he got caught, and now looks about as bad as Boris Yeltsin) is in the fix Shakespeare described like this: "The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Starr didn't plant Monica or Kathleen or Paula on Clinton; Clinton found them all by himself.

Likewise, the Republicans should not depend on their stars (or the Starr report), but on themselves, to win seats in the November election. They still have only a few weeks left to prove that they can be real leaders.

Despite the depressing downside of the Monica scandal, it has had two helpful results. First, it has diminished the Imperial Presidency, thereby giving an opening to the Republican Congress to steer our ship of state away from Big Government at home and away from interventionist follies abroad.

Secondly, it has totally discredited the feminists. Their pretense of being advocates for women's rights has been blown away, exposing them as a mean-spirited bunch whose affections are for sale.

The feminists made a Faustian bargain that, if Clinton would give them everything they wanted on the abortion issue, they would lie with him to the bitter end. Double entendre intended.

For years, the official Republican Party line has been to pander to the feminists on their outrageous demands, whether they involved reverse-discrimination appointments or special-interest appropriations or putting more regulatory powers in the hands of the unaccountable bureaucracy. Republicans should now develop the manliness to reject feminist demands out of hand, because real men don't treat women either as sex kittens or as victims who need Big Brother government to solve their problems for them.

Let's get down to the business for which we elected two Republican Congresses and are dallying with the prospect of electing a consecutive third. The media tell us that Congress is paralyzed with fear that, if the appropriation bills are not as porked up with as much spending as Clinton wants, he will veto them and shut down the government and blame it on the Republicans, and that therefore Congress will pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) containing all the spending Clinton wants.

In other words, the Republican leadership has ceded the initiative, i.e., the leadership, to Bill Clinton, and is content to play out the clock and hope that Monica wins for them. Another evidence of the lack of Republican leadership is the conventional wisdom that Republican Members of Congress "like things the way they are," (i.e., with Clinton suffering in disgrace), have no stomach for impeachment, and want to avoid an Al Gore incumbency.

Here are some suggestions for the 105th Congress, in its waning weeks, to show the voters that it can exercise some leadership. These are win-win issues, even if Clinton vetoes them.

1. Pass some kind of a tax cut, almost any kind. The budget surplus is ample justification.

2. Prohibit the spending of federal funds to gather or coordinate personal health records on a national database.

3. Prohibit the spending of federal funds to develop or use a national I.D. card, or to require state driver's licenses to masquerade as a national I.D. card.

4. Prohibit the spending of federal funds for national testing of schoolchildren (because we know that, if the U.S. Department of Education writes the test, it will control the curriculum).

5. Forbid the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing any regulations to implement the Global Warming Treaty, which the Senate will not ratify.

6. Order the building of an anti-missile defense system to protect American lives against Communist China's 13 intercontinental ballistic missiles targeted on U.S. cities.

7. Remove all the ruinous regulations on Medical Savings Accounts in the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act that have prevented their widespread use.

8. Defeat handouts for the International Monetary Fund.

9. Defeat Fast Track, because that means "we trust Clinton," and we don't.

10. The Senate should pass the ban on partial birth abortions over Clinton's veto, which the House has already passed.

11. The Senate should pass the American Land Sovereignty Protection Act (already passed by the House) to prohibit any more UN World Heritage Sites or Biosphere Reserves from being designated without specific Congressional approval.