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    Congressional Odyssey: The Saga Of A Senate Bill
    Congressional Odyssey: The Saga Of A Senate Bill
    Congressional Odyssey: The Saga Of A Senate Bill
    Ebook215 pages4 hours

    Congressional Odyssey: The Saga Of A Senate Bill

    By T.R. Reid

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    About this ebook

    Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid takes a candid look at Washington personalities and politics, revealing the motives and strategies, the cooperation and rivalry, the honesty and the deceit behind a seemingly minor piece of legislation. He traces the course of S.790--the Inland Waterways Bill--from its inception to its eventual passage, a process with as many twists and subplots as a novel, and with characters just as vivid.

    In Congressional Odyssey: The Saga of a Senate Bill you will discover:

    - a cast of main characters including Jimmy Carter, Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Hamilton Jordan, Howard Baker, Tip O'Neill, Russel Long, and other key political figures

    - a covert alliance between the railroad lobby and environmentalists, masked by a money-laundering scheme

    - the White House in-fighting triggered by the bill, leading to the ouster of Brock Adams during President Carter's cabinet shakeup

    - Carter's problems with the Congressional leadership, exacerbated by his support of the Inland Waterways Bill authored by Republican Senator Pete Domenici

    - "know-who" lawyers, who get things done through their connections rather than their legal abilities

    - the Alton, Illinois, Lock and Dam 26 project that earned Senator Proxmire's first "Golden Fleece Award" for wasting tax dollars

    - the thoughts and feelings of the dozens of central personalities who talked with surprising frankness to T.R. Reid

    Congressional Odyssey: The Saga of a Senate Bill makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the people and the power struggles in the public eye, and behind closed doors, on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 15, 1980
    ISBN9781466834842
    Congressional Odyssey: The Saga Of A Senate Bill

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      Book preview

      Congressional Odyssey - T.R. Reid

      1

      Forever Free?

      Anyone who has had the good fortune to visit Washington, D.C., in the spring knows that the capital then takes on the appearance of a greenhouse where the flowers have staged a coup. From the middle of February, when the first saffron crocus pokes up through the snowy mud, to the end of May, when the last scarlet azalea fades away, the city is a blooming rainbow. The traditional center of this urban rainbow has been the Tidal Basin, where delicate cherry blossoms framing the graceful dome of the Jefferson Memorial set the scene for what is, according to the Kodak people, the country’s most popular snapshot.

      In fact, though, Washington’s lushest concentration of vernal blossom can be found on the sloping grounds surrounding the U.S. Capitol. Although members of Congress love to boast about how miserly they can be with public funds, both houses have always spent generously to enhance their own surroundings. The annual budget for upkeep of the Capitol grounds is about $2 million, giving Congress one of the world’s most pampered public gardens. The results are spectacular. On Capitol Hill, and in the Botanical Gardens at its foot, the springtime visitor can find hundreds of species of annuals, biennials, and perennials.

      In the spring of odd-numbered years, in the first months after a newly elected Congress convenes, the Capitol also blooms with a legislative species of perennial—the tried and true bills that are introduced, year after year, whether or not they have a chance of being enacted into law. Some of these bills, such as the famous one proposing that the marigold be designated the national flower, are introduced mainly for the sake of tradition. It just wouldn’t seem like Congress, explains Senator Howard H. Baker, Jr., a Tennessee Republican who is the marigold’s current champion, if somebody didn’t put in a marigold bill. Some perennials have political roots: Congressmen from New York City, where tenants are more numerous than homeowners, invariably introduce bills to give renters the same tax breaks that mortgage payers enjoy. (The bills invariably die in committee.) And some of the never-say-die bills are introduced because their sponsors are convinced that this year, finally, the thing might actually pass. After all, they would say, look what old Ed Hebert did.

      It was a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when a newly elected Democratic Congressman from Louisiana, F. Edward Hebert, first proposed legislation to give the armed services their own medical school. Nothing came of it at first, but Hebert kept dropping it in the hopper, Congress after Congress. By the 1970s, Congressman Hebert had become Chairman Hebert of the House Armed Services Commitee and, like most chairmen, he had little trouble winning approval for this pet project. Today Hebert’s impossible dream, the Medical College of the Armed Forces, stands as a $42-million reality in Bethesda, Maryland.

      Beginning in the 1930s, the catalogue of legislative perennials regularly included a short-lived species called a waterway user charge bill that set forth a simple proposition: Those who ship freight on the nation’s canals and rivers should help the government pay for building and maintaining those waterways.

      The legislation was generally launched with a glowing press release pointing out that it would save the government hundreds of millions of dollars and eliminate a fundamental inequity of national transportation policy. Nonetheless, the water-freight industry, which had never paid a penny of tolls or taxes to use the multibillion-dollar network of canals, channels, dams, and locks built by the Army Corps of Engineers, always managed to sink the legislation before it could navigate the first step toward passage.

      Prospects were not exactly bright, then, on February 24, 1977, when Pete V. Domenici, a casual, friendly Republican Senator from New Mexico, strolled to the front of the Senate chamber and plopped a waterway user charge bill on the long marble desk there. Not many of Domenici’s colleagues noticed the new bill—the 95th Congress was six weeks old, and hundreds of bills had been introduced already—but those who did were surprised. After four years in the Senate, the 44-year-old Domenici had a reputation as a reasonable, realistic sort—not the type given to futile gestures. Why had a practical guy like that latched onto this hopeless case?

      Domenici was aware of that sentiment, and it left him sorely frustrated.

      Man, it’s so frustrating! the Senator said a few days after he had introduced his bill. This is an important issue—we’re talking big money here. And anybody with common sense can see that this user charge is way overdue. But nobody around here takes it seriously.

      The Senator had a point. To most members of Congress, the waterway fee seemed to be of a piece with the marigold bill and other frivolous forms of perennial legislation. In fact, though, the user-charge bill raised a fundamental question about governmental policy toward one of the oldest industries in the nation’s history.

      The industry, in fact, was older than the nation. Even before the end of the Revolutionary War, leaders of the nascent United States recognized that a reliable transportation system would be essential to mold the 13 disparate colonies into a single country. In an era before railroads and paved highways, watercourses for barge and boat traffic offered the obvious solution. Between 1800 and 1840, more than 3,000 miles of canals were built, and hundreds of miles more of water highway were created by leveeing large rivers and dredging shallow ones.

      For the first half-century of the republic, inland waterway development was left largely to the states, because of a general belief that internal improvements were outside the bailiwick of the federal government. Chief Justice John Marshall sank that notion for good in 1824 when he ruled in the steamboat case, Gibbons v. Ogden, that Congress had plenary authority over interstate commerce. Within months, Congress had passed a River and Harbors Act authorizing federal money and manpower—specifically, the Army Corps of Engineers—to construct navigation improvements on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

      Nearly every Congress thereafter passed at least one Rivers and Harbors Act, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the annual authorization bill for waterway construction and maintenance became one of Capitol Hill’s cherished political institutions. It still is today. For Congressmen, winning new water projects for their districts is unassailable evidence that they are working hard in Washington for the folks back home. For the Army, waterway work is a useful public relations tool for staying on the good side of members of Congress. As a result, Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers developed the philosophy that no water project was too big or too expensive to build. This can do attitude reached its apogee in the early 1970s, when the Army finished a 30-year, $1.2-billion effort that tranformed the Arkansas River from a muddy gulch into a shimmering blue freightway, creating bustling international ports in such prairie towns as Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Catoosa, Oklahoma—several hundred miles from the nearest ocean.

      Congress has been so generous in approving such pork-barrel projects that today there are more than 25,000 miles of inland waterways, which serve as highways for fleets of barges that move huge loads of bulk commodities—grain and soybeans, coal and oil, cement, salt, and chemicals. As the waterway network has grown, the barge industry has expanded with it. At the end of World War II, barges carried about 1 percent of the nation’s freight; by the end of the Vietnam War, the barge share had grown to 16 percent. The barge boom did not escape the notice of Wall Street and the major corporations; some of the largest energy, agribusiness, and manufacturing conglomerates have acquired barge lines and found them to be highly profitable subsidiaries.

      A major reason for the profitability of the water-freight business is that barge lines have been the only form of transit that pay nothing for their rights of way. Railroads pay for and lay their own track. When the track needs maintenance, the repair work is done, not by the U.S. Army, using federal funds, but by the railroads, with their own money. Truckers move their loads on government-built highways, but the trucks pay for the roads through tolls, license fees, and a federal gasoline tax that is deposited in the Highway Trust Fund, a sort of federal bank account that has paid for the interstate highway system. Air-freight firms pay airport fees and a fuel tax that supports an airport trust

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