The Week.(News Briefs)

Jack Kemp on a fellow pundit: "Listening to Mario Cuomo identify what a Republican should do is like listening to Evel Knievel talk about the space program."

Did you catch Sen. Robert Byrd on television? Who says all those old crackers became Republicans?

Bill Clinton will get three entries in the 17th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. "I experimented with marijuana a time or two. And I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale . . ." ". . . I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." And, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is . . ." A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver, as Bartlett's will tell you.

Liberal Republican senators, led by Olympia Snowe of Maine, continue to demand that any tax cut include a "trigger" that would stop taxes from falling in any year that the surplus fell too low. It's a bad idea, since it would keep taxes high whenever the economy faltered, and the White House is right to oppose it. But it may be the price of passing the tax cut. Should conservatives be willing to accept a trigger if the alternative is a smaller tax cut? Yes-so long as the trigger is designed to be hard to pull. The president could be given authority to ignore the trigger if he thinks it necessary; or, better yet, the trigger could be incorporated into the Senate budget rules, which nobody ever bothers enforcing. Conservatives should borrow a line from the liberals: No trigger without a trigger lock.

The Left is aghast that someone besides Mitch McConnell has noticed that parts of the McCain-Feingold bill are unconstitutional. The New York Times has rapped the AFL-CIO ("misguided," "bad for the country") for concluding that the bill's limits on political advertising 60 days before an election are a direct affront to the First Amendment. An article in The New Republic suggests the AFL-CIO is foolish to spend time opposing the provision-because it will be struck down by the courts anyway. (Now, that reasoning shows an admirable respect for constitutional principle.) The raw politics here is obvious. The unions can't just grandstand now that the legislation might actually pass the Senate, but must seriously consider its consequences. This new scrutiny may be opportunistic, but that doesn't mean the McCain-Feingold bill can withstand it.

Al Gore may have lost the Florida recount, but for a moment it seemed that the centerpiece of his environmental agenda would survive. EPA head Christine Todd Whitman said that the Bush administration would-in keeping with a little-noticed campaign pledge at odds with Bush's general program-push legislation to regulate carbon dioxide as part of a "multi-pollutant strategy" to combat global warming. But not so fast: The president soon told senators that he no longer supports the new regulation. This was shrewd backpedaling both politically-given the brewing firestorm on the right-and as a matter of policy. The carbon- dioxide limits would inflate already-high energy prices and further harm the sagging economy. The Bush administration would do better to rely on market pressures to accelerate innovation and encourage greater energy efficiency. That way voters would know that they elected a different shade of green at the ballot box last November.

The White House is modifying its plans to aid faith-based charities. Some conservatives, led by Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute, had worried that a policy giving federal bureaucrats discretion over which charities got grants would, over time, threaten the independence of churches. John DiIulio, head of the White House initiative, initially responded to these criticisms with unseemly attacks on the critics. But cooler heads have prevailed. The initiative will now place less emphasis on grants, and more on removing regulatory obstacles to charitable work and on tax credits that encourage charitable giving. This seems sensible. Some conservatives had argued there was no reason to worry; we should have faith, they said, that the churches would resist the temptation to sacrifice their freedom for cash. Perhaps they are right. But some temptations are best avoided altogether.