Crimes Against Nature

by Kennedy, Jr. Robert F.

  “When it comes to the coal industry,” Cindy Rank of the West Virginia Highland Conservancy told me in frustration, “they don’t even need to lobby anymore. With Griles in there, it just happens.”

  The pillage of Appalachia by the coal industry is being made possible by officials who view public service as an opportunity for wholesale plunder. It is just one tragic legacy of this White House. “I believe that the coal industry has found the best friend they’ve ever had in the Bush administration,” Judy Bonds told me. “Definitely the Bush administration and the coal industry have teamed up to wipe Appalachia off the map. This is Appalachia’s last stand. When the mountains go, so goes our culture and our people, and it’ll be the Bush administration that pushes the stake through our heart.”

  Killing the Energy Bill

  The handouts to King Coal were bad enough. But we knew things could still get worse, much worse: If Dick Cheney’s energy bill came to pass, the giant subsidies and rollbacks doled out ad hoc to the coal industry would be multiplied several times over, with catastrophic impacts on America’s economy, environment, and values.

  The collective horror at Dick Cheney’s plan galvanized the environmental movement. National groups stepped up their efforts to defend the United States against Bush’s overall agenda, while a core faction formed the Energy Strategy Group, specifically to derail Cheney’s energy package. I worked alongside the leaders of this team, NRDC legislative director Karen Wayland and her predecessor, Alyssondra Campaigne. The group included energy specialists from the NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. We ferreted out donors, conducted polling, mobilized members to contact their public officials, and did our best to alert the public to Cheney’s plan to loot the country’s treasures. We deployed the NRDC’s influential “network of aces” — business leaders, actors, and former political leaders who could call senators directly. More than 500,000 activists wrote letters and sent e-mails to their elected representatives and the White House. The NRDC sent me on a media blitz, writing editorials and articles, doing back-to-back interviews with television, radio, and news outlets across the country. The spirit of cooperation made this one of the best collaborative efforts in the history of the environmental movement.

  Some groups, like Friends of the Earth and U.S. PIRG, concentrated on following the money, tracing the path from corporate contributions to lucrative legislation. The Sierra Club tapped its broad national membership to alert editorial boards and members of Congress at district meetings. The Wilderness Society and the National Environmental Trust handled the analysis of the bill’s catastrophic impact on public lands. The NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the U.S. PIRG deployed their experts to scrutinize every other aspect: efficiency and conservation, coastal issues, coal-bed methane, clean air policy, Indian reservation energy issues, drinking water, global warming. And for 18 months, while Democrats controlled the Senate, we succeeded in repelling the Cheney attack. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle wouldn’t let the bill move.

  Then, in January 2003, Republicans took control of both houses of Congress. That April, House Republicans, led by Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Energy Committee Chair Billy Tauzin, passed a nightmare version of the Cheney package.

  1 The Senate’s new Republican leadership, however, decided that their companion bill, hobbled by polarizing elements of the Cheney plan, could not pass a floor vote. That’s when the Democrats got snookered.

  Setting up a bait-and-switch, the Republicans floated the idea that they might reconsider a Democratic energy bill that had stalled just after the 2002 election, while the Democrats still controlled the Senate. It was a bill that the environmental community didn’t much like, but it wasn’t the house of horrors that the current one was. The Democrats entered the trap. Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, who had the floor, offered the previous year’s bill. The Republicans rallied behind it as promised, and it passed on July 31.

  2

  A chagrined Karen Wayland was watching on C-SPAN from her office. “At the moment the bill passed, Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, grinned widely and said, ‘I’m happy because I’ll be rewriting that bill. It’s up to us, we’re in the majority, and we’ll be writing a completely new bill.’ ”

  3 Domenici proceeded to take the bill to “conference.” Whenever companion bills get approved by the two branches of Congress, the leaders of both houses work together in conference to reconcile the two into a final version that both branches must pass with a majority vote. But Domenici knew that in this conference committee, the Republicans, who controlled both houses, would be all alone. He could rewrite the Democratic bill from scratch. The Democrats had sealed their fate by failing to insist on a provision preventing the Senate bill from being changed in conference.

  Over the next several months, the Republicans took maximum advantage of the situation, excluding Democrats while they constructed an energy-lobby dream deal. NRDC political coordinator Greg Wetstone, who had previously been counsel for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, watched the spectacle from the sidelines. “They didn’t let one Democrat participate in the process,” he remembers. “They abandoned all the old models that included working together with people, soliciting bipartisan support, forming coalitions, reaching out to the other side, and negotiating compromises where everybody’s voice is heard. The only outsiders with input were energy-industry lobbyists. And at a time when we desperately need a national energy policy, they produced a special-interest bonanza.”

  Since the process was completely controlled by the Republicans, none of us saw the bill as it was being hammered out, but we heard rumors from some of the moderate Republicans. Among the Republicans’ shrewdest maneuvers was to keep, until the bitter end, two particularly offensive items in the bill: a proposal to drill oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and another to lift a moratorium on oil exploration on the outer continental shelf. Recalls Wetstone, “They forced us to spend our chits with the moderate Republicans fighting those hot-button issues.” In the end they could claim, as Billy Tauzin did at the press conference announcing the bill, that they’d dropped those provisions as a concession to environmentalists, fostering the illusion that the bill was a product of some process of negotiation. Even National Public Radio’s Terry Gross was taken in. When I was a guest on her show Fresh Air during the debate, she chided me that the bill couldn’t be so one-sided since the Republicans had dropped plans to drill in the refuge. “It was like putting lipstick on a donkey,” I responded.

  Senator Domenici and Representative Tauzin finally announced on Friday, November 21, 2003, that the bill was ready.

  4 The House vote was scheduled for the following Tuesday and the Senate’s was set for Wednesday. Domenici was coy when reporters asked him to release the bill at his Friday press conference. In a clear attempt to minimize media attention and public scrutiny, the Republican leadership refused to release the text of the bill until late Saturday night, giving congressional Democrats a mere three days to review the 1,200-page document before voting on it.

  5

  The NRDC’s rapid-response team spent Saturday night and Sunday picking the bill apart. Wayland assigned specific sections to each of the NRDC’s experts, and, after retrieving their analysis, she consolidated the reports for distribution to other environmental groups, the press, and our allies in Congress.

  The thing was hideous. There were more than 60 loathsome provisions that would damage the environment and add billions to the national debt. It would establish oil and gas development as the dominant use of federal lands, subsidize the building of more nuclear power plants, and exempt polluters from core provisions of America’s clean air and water laws. The best estimate of the bill’s corporate tax breaks and subsidies was $100 billion. Republican Senator John McCain called it the “no lobbyist left behind bill.”

  6 It had more pork than a Smithfield slaughterhouse. Even factory farm m
ultinationals got a 50-cent-per-gallon tax break — for using diesel fuel. Naturally, Halliburton got its share of the booty — a tax break for its environmentally destructive hydraulic- fracturing technology. There was also money for a shopping center in Louisiana that would host a Hooters, leading McCain to dub the bill a welfare giveaway “for Hooters and polluters.”

  7

  “This was legislation by unrestrained greed,” says Wayland. “Everybody got their piece.”

  8 Wetstone, the coordinator of the environmental community’s fight against Newt Gingrich’s notorious “Regulatory Reform” bill back in 1995, told me, “In 25 years, this is the worst bill for the environment that has ever proceeded through the process. It absolutely devastates America’s public lands and our existing laws protecting air and drinking water. It increases our dependence on foreign oil, bankrupts our Treasury — and it’s antithetical to making progress on the most important environmental problem we’ve ever faced, which is global warming.” Speaking of the Republicans in conference, Wetstone shakes his head in disbelief. “It was like Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They got gold fever. There was never enough. They loaded the pork train down with favors for every polluter. Then they piled on money for every congressman who would support the bill and tried to keep it moving fast enough to avoid scrutiny and debate.”

  Among the biggest subsidies were multibillion-dollar packages for ethanol manufacturers, included to lure support from farm-state Democrats.

  9 That tactic prompted a series of demoralizing defections by Midwestern Democrats, including our former champion, Tom Daschle.

  10 Daschle had long promoted ethanol as a salve for South Dakota’s economic woes. He was in a very tight race, and his in-state political advisers told him that if he didn’t support the energy bill with its ethanol provisions, he was politically dead. But at least Daschle refrained from taking a public position on the bill until the last day, leaving other Democrats with the flexibility to join us on the barricades without appearing to challenge his leadership.

  Ethanol lost us other core Democrats: Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Mark Dayton from Minnesota.

  11 Two more perched on the fence until the last day — Evan Bayh of Indiana and Dick Durbin of Illinois. From the outset, we’d been hard-pressed to figure out how to block this legislation without the ability to control the gavel in the House or the Senate and without a veto pen. Now we were dealing with an entirely new political landscape, scrambling to cultivate new constituencies.

  Our only weapon was the filibuster. Senator Charles Schumer of New York, along with Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California and Senator Mary Cantwell of Washington, had promised that they would use Senate rules to mount an endless debate to block the bill.

  12 The Republicans would need 60 votes to end debate. But Cheney was lobbying furiously, calling senators, trying to cut into our 41 reliable filibuster votes. Senate offices were flooded with calls from energy and agricultural lobbyists and others with an interest in the bill.

  13

  The White House and Republican leaders were using the entire omnibus budget bill to buy off votes. “They had the whole federal budget to bribe supporters,” recalls Wetstone. Domenici, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and the other senior leadership were coaxing Democrats onto the pork train, offering lucrative projects in their home districts. It got so bad that the Wall Street Journal condemned GOP senators for engaging in “months of plotting to buy enough votes with some $95 billion in tax breaks and pork-barrel spending.”

  14

  When the price was right, even some of our stalwarts went south. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota had held a press conference two weeks before the energy bill was released at which he vowed passionately that he would stand firm for a true national energy policy that must include vital programs for conservation; including, for example, the requirement that utilities have renewable electricity in their portfolios. Dorgan is from a corn state but swore he wouldn’t be bought off by ethanol. “I’ve been working on ethanol for a long time, and the ethanol provisions as they’re being discussed right now don’t meet my requirements for what an ethanol mandate should be, so that’s not going to buy my vote.” Afterward, the Republicans added an $800 million coal gasification power plant in his state and Dorgan switched his vote. So much for standing firm for a national energy policy.

  NRDC members and other activists sent more than 100,000 messages to Congress, urging the bill’s defeat. I hit every talk show that would have me and stayed on the phone to Democratic senators from Saturday through Thursday. Key Midwesterners like Bayh and Durbin told me they couldn’t commit until they saw the final bill. There was a storm of e-mails back and forth. “It was a really wild, exciting ride,” recalls Karen Wayland. “We felt like David going up against Goliath. I mean it was such a hostile political climate. It just seemed impossible that we could win.”

  15

  Evan Bayh told me on Tuesday that he would oppose the bill and weather the wrath of Indiana’s powerful corn lobby. When I thanked him for his courage, he dismissed the compliment. “It was the Hooters,” he said. Indiana is in the Bible Belt, but Bayh joked that it wasn’t a moral objection: “They were pissed that Indiana didn’t get a Hooters.”

  16

  The bill was like old fish: It didn’t take long before it began to stink. “It was classic hubris. They got greedy, they couldn’t stop themselves, and they overreached,” said Greg Wetstone. “Once it got examined, we got six Republicans to stand with us.”

  17 We had always hoped for support from the New England moderates Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins from Maine, and Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island. But we also got three conservatives: Arizona’s John McCain along with John Sununu and Judd Gregg from New Hampshire.

  18 “I would say we all had concerns on both sides,” Sununu later told me. “McCain, Gregg, and I were probably the most appalled by the fiscal issues and Collins, Chafee, and Snowe were most appalled by the environmental issues. But there’s no question our interests overlapped significantly in both areas. The bill seemed to be designed to try to address the needs of specific elements of the energy industry rather than get out with good ideas for producing reliable energy.”

  19

  On Tuesday the House passed the Domenici bill.

  20 Then they tried to ram it through the Senate. But the vote never came. The Republicans failed to muster the 60 votes needed to kill our filibuster. As dozens of the bill’s most destructive provisions came to light — many of them exposed by the NRDC’s legislative team — a national tidal wave of editorial opposition and public outrage swamped Congress. Even the Wall Street Journal joined the din against the bill, calling it “a cornucopia of special interest energy payoffs.”

  21 Unable to secure the votes they needed to end the filibuster on Wednesday, the Republican leadership rescheduled the filibuster vote for the following morning.

  A group of my colleagues — NRDC president John Adams, Greg Wetstone, energy guru Dan Lashof, and Karen Wayland — were working the phones and the Senate lobby when it came time to vote on Thursday morning. Everyone expected the Republicans to succeed in killing our filibuster. The energy industry was so sure of victory that the American Petroleum Institute had planned a huge celebration at Charlie Palmer’s, Washington’s cigar-chomping, good ol’ boys’ steak-house on Friday night after the vote. There were a few environmentalists and a multitude of industry lobbyists milling around the anteroom and the Capitol’s adjacent hallways. “We went into that vote still not knowing where three or four members were,” Wetstone told me. Then the vote to end the debate was taken.

  22

  We won by two votes. Despite last-minute arm twisting, with our six Republicans the Senate leadership fell short of forcing an end to debate on the bill.

  23 “It was a very special moment, a huge victory for us against enormous odds,” Karen Wayland sa
ys of that night.

  I was at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., addressing a banquet when Wetstone called me with the news. When I announced it a few minutes later from the stage, there was a wild ovation.

  Wetstone remembers the glum industry lobbyists who were milling about the Senate lobby looking depressed. “They were shocked,” he says. “They had to cancel their victory party at Charlie Palmer’s.” He recalls watching groups of them talk heatedly after the vote: “Some of them had made hundreds of thousands of dollars telling people they’re going to bring home these massive taxpayer subsidies and special gifts for polluters.” Wetstone sounded almost like he felt sorry for them. I reminded him that they still got paid.

  24

  I ran into Senator Sununu that evening. He was leaving the CNN building in Washington and hailed me as I walked in to record Crossfire. He was bouncing with energy, stoked by the victory, and he promised me that even if Domenici broke the filibuster and brought the bill back the following week — which environmentalists expected and feared — he would block it on the budget point of order, a procedural objection that requires a separate vote on fiscal issues. Any member can call for such a vote when it appears that a bill would break the statutory budget cap. Normally, if there’s support for a bill, the Senate just ignores that rule. But this time, Sununu would raise the objection. He also assured me that we would pick up votes from many conservative senators who had voted for the bill to support the president but whose principles would compel them to oppose the bill once it was formally framed as a budget issue.