NEW CONGRESS SHOULD FIX THE CLEAN AIR ACT

Did Republicans get the message?

In last week's stunning general elections, they took control of both houses of Congress. But did they get the message?

Former President George Bush didn't get the message and served one term. President Bill Clinton didn't get the message and has suffered a stinging midterm reprimand.

The message? Americans in newly significant numbers want limits on their government, even if they do not always agree on where those limits should be drawn.

Republicans interested in holding their new political ground must show they got the message. They must quickly delineate boundaries between the federal government and American lives.

A PLACE TO START

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 gives them a good place to start. In January, American motorists will begin to feel the full effects of this triumph of activist government. Gasoline prices will rise. And motorists in areas with pollution problems will begin submitting to vehicle-emissions inspections.

The inspection program, a regulator's dream, requires repairs and retesting for vehicles that fail biannual emissions tests-an estimated 20% of the fleet. Vehicles failing retests can operate under waiver if their owners have spent enough on them.

Spending requirements vary from area to area, depending on degree of noncompliance with air quality standards. Costs of the emissions tests vary, too. In Houston, a top ozone trouble spot, an emissions inspection will cost $23, and the repair outlay required for a waiver will be $450.

There will probably be a lot of $450 repair bills in Houston, regardless of the work performed. In Dallas, identical work will cost $200 for model years after 1981 because that's the waiver limit there.

And this probably won't do much for air quality. It may send a few smoky junkers to the scrap heap ahead of their owners' schedules. But there are more-efficient and less-meddlesome ways to accomplish the same thing. Otherwise, motorists who want to keep driving chronic polluters will find ways to escape the repairs, if not the inspections themselves. Congress has given them strong incentive to try.

So American motorists will begin to shoulder a heavy new burden of regulation at the same time Congress begins its next session. The cost of removing the last, most-stubborn, and least significant measure of air pollution will push into the national experience just as last week's happy group of government minimizers takes charge of Congress.

It's test time, then: Do the Republican victors or do they not believe in limiting government?

If they do, one of their first items of business should be to fix some of the worst mischief of 1990 air quality legislation. It's too late to start over on reformulated gasoline. But it's not too late to replace the heavy-handed and costly emissions testing program with a system of more-reasonable incentives for scrapping old polluters and keeping modem vehicles tuned. And it's not too late to repeal the ethanol mandate in reformulated gasoline, which will aggravate the coming rise in fuel costs without improving air quality at all.

CHANGE MEANS CHANGE

Repairs like these would demonstrate that Republicans mean change when they promise change. Failure to make them would give Americans good reason to stay angry. And it would enable the new minority party in Congress to remind voters at some opportune moment in the next 2 years that the Clean Air Act Amendments and ethanol mandate originated in a Republican administration.