Let’s Take Names, Kick Some Rear

It’s not that anybody expects much of Congress these days; we’re just grateful when they don’t shut down the government. But is it too much to expect that they might have passed disaster relief for the Dakotas and Minnesota before they went off on a two-week vacation?

As the Grand Forks Herald announced in its classic headline, the town has already been through “Hell and High Water” - and now, while those folks are sitting in a sea of gunk with their lives washed away, they have also had to endure the sight of Congress using their tragedy to play petty little political games.

What an unedifying episode. In a situation like this, voters need to follow the old dictum of taking names and kicking rears. So, herewith, some of the major players in this disgusting performance:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens found the disastrous floods in the upper Midwest would be the perfect opportunity to pass a pet piece of legislation to make it easier to build roads through federal parks, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas. I know - it’s one of those deals to which you can only respond with a stupefied “Huh?” Or, as we say in Texas, “Do whut?”

Since the whole point of parks, refuges and wilderness areas is that they mostly shouldn’t have roads, well may you wonder what the devil is going on here. “Such a requirement could effectively render the federal government powerless to prevent the conversion of foot paths, dog-sled trails, jeep tracks, ice roads and other primitive transportation routes into paved highways,” said Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

At issue is a law passed in 1866, repealed 110 years later and then used by the Reagan administration as an anti-environmentalist weapon. Bill Arthur, Northwest regional director for the Sierra Club, told the Seattle PostIntelligencer, “This is just another sleazy way to find an antiquated law that lost its purpose 100 years ago and see if you can use that to destroy wildlife areas.”

See, even though this law was repealed 20 years ago, there are still hundreds of claims pending under its now-defunct provisions. Many of these right-of-way claims are tied to old mining claims on federal land, and they involve millions of acres. Utah and Alaska are especially keen to open up protected federal lands to all kinds of exploitation, and Stevens’ little rider to the disaster relief bill would give states the power to override the feds’ decisions about what goes down on federal land.

Rep. Richard Pombo of California and Sens. Larry Craig of Idaho and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas decided that the Upper Midwest’s disaster was their opportunity, and they tried to tack on a little provision to gut the Endangered Species Act. Cute, eh?

The waiver would have exempted the rebuilding of drainage control projects in the flooded area from the ESA’s provisions because obviously you want to get things rebuilt ASAP. Except that it wasn’t just flood control in affected areas but absolutely anywhere. No need to worry about salmon in the Columbia River or endangered species affected by the Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado.

The ploy was beat back by a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats led by Rep. Sherwood Boehlert. As soon as Boehlert narrowed the waiver to apply only to emergency repairs, the sponsors pulled down the whole measure, thus proving that their only motivation was to gut the ESA. The Arizona Daily Star called it “a sneaky, unnecessary and ecologically harmful free pass to developers.”

Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho got into a funny name-calling contest with Boehlert. After he beat off the sneak attack on the ESA, Chenoweth, who’s a big anti-environmentalist, claimed that Boehlert doesn’t care about Western flooding because he lives in “a New York district paved over with concrete and immune to floods.” Actually, Boehlert is from a rural district in upstate New York that’s less populated than Chenoweth’s. Six of his constituents drowned in 1996 floods.

Then there’s the Republican leadership of both houses, who decided that the disaster relief bill was a dandy vehicle for tacking on a continuing resolution - a legislative gizmo that allows government to function during budget fights by continuing current spending levels. This has something to do with the ongoing budget battle between Clinton and the R’s, but it has nothing to do with flood victims in North Dakota.

The Republican leadership struck again by putting the issue of statistical sampling in the 2000 Census onto the disaster relief bill. The R’s are convinced that the statistical sampling issue will turn up too many poor and old folks who need government help, thus costing the government more money. They want to stick with the actual head count. As anyone who has ever gone out with a census-taker knows, lots of old folks don’t answer the door when you knock, and homeless folks are exceptionally hard to count. And none of this has anything to do with the flood.

Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin said: “We’re in chaos. Congress looks like it can’t put together a two-car funeral with the help of a dead undertaker.”

What do you mean “looks like”? Have a nice vacation, fellas.

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