HumanEvents

Daschle's Distorted Agenda By Timothy P. Carney The Week of December 10, 2001

In the midst of a recession and a war fought both in Central Asia and at home, Americans worried about our security and our economy can rest assured that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.) is hard at work tinkering with railroad retirement law.

As majority leader, Daschle controls the Senate agenda. If he doesn’t think he can win a vote (or that debating an issue will benefit his party politically), he simply can keep the vote from happening.

A glance at the Senate vote schedule over recent weeks reveals Daschle’s priorities are:

A bill governing retirement plans for rail workers was put up for a vote, while the energy bill demanded by President Bush, and passed by the House August 2, sits dormant.

The law authorizing billions in federal farm subsidies doesn’t expire until next year, but Daschle has made sure it gets priority this year over an economic stimulus package.

While the Environmental Protection Agency labors to clean anthrax from his Hart Building office, Daschle is refusing to move a bioterrorism bill.

Finally, two human beings have been cloned and allowed to die by a Massachusetts company, and new human clones may be created any day, because Daschle will not allow a vote on the Senate version of the human cloning ban, supported by President Bush, that passed the House by a large majority in July.

In the wee hours of August 2, as the summer recess approached, the House voted 240 to 189 to pass HR 4, "Securing America’s Future Energy Act" (SAFE). Earlier, Democrats failed 206 to 223 to kill the language that would authorize oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska.

Today, as homes across the country are burning oil and gas to keep warm, that bill is no closer to being law than it was on that sweltering August night. What happened?

As Republican staffers in the Senate tell it, Daschle basically dissolved the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in October when it became clear that the panel, controlled by Democrats, would produce a bill that favored drilling in Alaska. Daschle said he would produce new legislation outside the normal committee process. So far, this has prevented any consideration of the House bill on the Senate floor.

Democrats hold a 12-to-11 majority on the Energy committee, but a vote on ANWR would have come down in favor of Republicans, committee sources say. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D.-La.) made it fairly clear she favors drilling in ANWR. Also, the senators from Alaska (who are Republicans) and the senators from Hawaii (who are Democrats) have an agreement that they will side with one another on issues that primarily affect one of those states. Because Alaska Senators Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens want ANWR drilling, Hawaii Senators Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye are ready to support it, too. Akaka sits on the Energy Committee, meaning ANWR would pass at least 13 to 10 if no Republicans were to defect.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D.-N.M.) is the Energy chair. Committee aides say that in earlier committee markups he had lost votes on some smaller issues involving electricity, leading him to believe he could not hold Democrats in line on the bigger issue of ANWR drilling. The solution: Have Daschle shut his committee down for the year.

On October 9, Bingaman sent out a press release. "At the request of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle," it said, "Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman today suspended any further mark-up of energy legislation for this session of Congress."

"Instead," the release said, "the chairman will propose comprehensive and balanced energy legislation that can be added by the majority leader to the Senate calendar for potential action prior to adjournment."

The purported reason for this unorthodox, undemocratic approach: "The Senate’s leadership sincerely wants to avoid quarrelsome, divisive votes in committee. At a time when Americans all over the world are pulling together with a sense of oneness and purpose, Congress has an obligation at the moment to avoid those contentious issues that divide, rather than unite, us."

"Quarrelsome, divisive votes," say Republicans, is a euphemism for votes that Bingaman and Daschle would lose. Last week, the two Democratic leaders finally unveiled their "comprehensive and balanced" bill, supposedly aimed at uniting Congress. The bill, say senior Republican aides, is heavily weighted in favor of environmentalists, with relatively little in it that would increase energy supplies.

Most obviously, it allows no drilling in ANWR.

In a floor speech last Wednesday, Alaska’s Murkowski sarcastically noted that Daschle must think that a bill put together by the elite of one party is less "divisive" than a bill favored by members of both parties.

"The majority leader has abolished one of the standing committees of the Senate," said Murkowski, "and crafted partisan legislation behind closed doors with special interests and without a whimper from the press."

Murkowski went on to point out that canceling all committee meetings violated a Senate rule in place since 1970 that requires every committee to meet at least once per month. "Neither the Standing Rules of the Senate nor the committee rules," said Murkowski, "provides an exception for the Democrat leader to abolish committees or order them to cease activities whenever there is a likelihood that they may take bipartisan action that would conflict with his partisan agenda."

But that is precisely the modus operandi of this Democratic leader.

A similar, but different fate befell the stimulus package. In the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus (D.-Mont.) was working closely with ranking Republican Chuck Grassley (Iowa) toward a compromise. Previously, Baucus had earned the ire of his more partisan colleagues when he and Grassley ironed out their differences to support President Bush’s tax-cut bill. Now, with a recession looming, he was eager to reach a deal with the Republicans for additional tax cuts.

Daschle wasn’t about to let that happen again. On November 6, he announced that he and Baucus would negotiate a partisan bill rather than allow the chairman and Grassley to work out a compromise.

On at least one issue, Daschle’s strong-arm tactics in subverting the majority of the Senate go directly to the issue of human life. In late November, a company in Massachusetts cloned human embryos for the first known time.

Back on July 31, the House had passed a bill, by a 265-to-162 vote, that would have banned cloning. Sixty-three House Democrats plus socialist Rep. Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) voted in favor of the bill. President Bush strongly supported it. And Sen. Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.) had sponsored a companion bill in the Senate.

If Daschle had allowed a vote, the cloning ban could have become law before human cloning had become a reality in the United States. At least one Senate Democrat, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, has publicly declared her support for the bill. Last week, she told the Baton Rouge Advocate, "What happened in Massachusetts this weekend shows the need for immediate congressional action."

The Advocate quoted her spokesman Rich Masters as saying, "She supports Sen. Brownback, and she is against the creation of human life by cloning." In addition, Brownback told Human Events that he had another Democratic supporter (see Human Events next week for a transcript of HE’s interview with Brownback).

After the news broke about the cloning in Massachusetts, Brownback tried to attach a six-month moratorium on all cloning to Daschle’s railroad retirement bill, but it got bundled up in the same amendment with Murkowski’s energy bill (both of which would have needed the support of 60 senators according to Senate rules), and the package fell on a procedural vote.

What drives Daschle’s agenda? Does he really believe that tinkering with railroad retirement is more important than bolstering the entire national economy during a recession? Is he stalling bills on taxes, energy and cloning because he fears they are really bad for the country, or are his motives more cynical?

A November 13 memo from three Democratic operatives strongly suggests that partisan politics is behind Daschle’s maneuvering. Signed by Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, Clinton campaign manager James Carville and Ted Kennedy campaign consultant Bob Shrum, the memo advises Democrats to cooperate with Bush on items directly related to the war efforts (in the face of Bush’s astronomical poll numbers), but sharply oppose him on domestic issues.

If ANWR passed, it would be a victory for Bush and congressional Republicans. If Congress cuts taxes, it would be another win for Bush and congressional Republicans. In fact, any bill that shortens the recession would likely help Bush and congressional Republicans. On all these issues, Democratic political interests call for inaction, say Senate Republican staffers.

Inaction is just what they’ve got, thanks to Tom Daschle.

-- Anonymous, December 08, 2001