By Scot Lehigh  |  June 9, 2006  |  The Boson Globe

IT’S A midterm election year, the Republican Congress and president are mired in a political bog, and critical issues face the country.

We know what matters weigh upon the nation’s mind, because Gallup just asked.

The situation in Iraq, fuel prices, immigration, the economy, and healthcare were the five concerns that stood out when Americans were polled on what the top priorities for the president and Congress should be.

So what priorities are Republican leaders pushing? Here are three: a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, another to prohibit flag-burning, and the repeal of the federal estate tax.

Interestingly enough, none of those even registered in the late May Gallup survey.

But it’s obviously frame-the-campaign time in Congress — and so the Republican leadership, with the help of President Bush, is trying to pump some voltage into potentially polarizing issues.

It’s hard to imagine a more transparent attempt on the part of the GOP high command to distract the country from what really matters.

The idea of amending the US Constitution to ban gay marriage should be anathema to principled conservatives. One advantage of federalism is that states can deal with the issue in different ways. In the last few years, they have done just that. Most have banned same-sex marriage, either by state constitutional amendment or statute; a handful have not.

Despite predictions of chaos, as Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a gay marriage foe, noted this week in effectively voting against the constitutional amendment, “legal pandemonium has not ensued.”

Indeed, the fact that the Republican-controlled Senate couldn’t even muster a majority on a preliminary procedural vote on the proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment — let alone the two-thirds tally it would take to move the amendment process forward — gives the lie to any notion that this was a pressing national concern.

Undeterred by that failure, however, Senate Majority Leader William Frist plans to proceed in his efforts to rally the GOP’s conservative base by pushing for a vote on an anti-flag-burning amendment in the near future. It’s not as though the United States has been beset by a sudden rash of flag-burning. But what if it had? If Congress’s response to symbolic protest is to try to ban it, our lawmakers will demonstrate just how little core commitment they have for the supposedly bedrock American principle of free speech.

And then there’s yesterday’s failed attempt to repeal the estate tax. Although Senate Republicans couldn’t rally enough support to move forward with debate on the legislation itself, the issue of the dreaded “death tax” seems certain to resurface on the campaign trail.

Here are a few facts that should be considered in the debate.

Under the old law, which taxed estates of more than $1 million ($1.35 million per married couple), only about 50,000 estates were subject to the levy in 2000. That number has been cut substantially under the phase-down that Bush pushed through Congress in 2001.

With this year’s provision, which raises the exemption to $2 million for an individual and $4 million for a couple, only an estimated 13,000 estates will face the tax. By 2009, when the exemption will rise to $3.5 million for individuals and $7 million for couples, with a rate of 45 percent, a projected 7,000 estates will be taxed.

“Nobody is talking about going back to the pre-2001 law,” says Joel Friedman, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Indeed, the general position for Democrats is that the estate tax should stay at the 2009 level.

But if it is repealed outright, over 10 years the full effects of that roll back would cost the Treasury almost $1 trillion in lost revenue when all the impacts, including higher interest on the national debt, are figured, says Friedman.

“Making the estate tax repeal permanent would lock it in right at the same point that the baby boomers are starting to retire,” notes Len Burman, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “We know that there are going to be immense demands on the Treasury. We also know the estate tax comes from people who are most able to pay it: 98 percent of the tax is paid by the richest 5 percent.”

Given that reality, it’s a testament to the cynicism of Republican strategists that they believe they can make such a boondoggle work for them on the hustings.