The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  There were larger geopolitical currents to take into consideration as well. Lloyd Bentsen noted that the Saudis had been moderate on oil prices and had been branded as “American lackeys” as a result. The Saudi government needed to show the region that it was gaining some benefit from its moderation in the area of international economic policy as well as its political and military policy course. A Senate decision to disapprove the package would have grave consequences for the relationship with Saudi Arabia going forward. Moynihan countered, saying that, in essence, the aircraft sale was a rationalization of “American nervelessness.”

  Tom Eagleton, another strong supporter of Israel, captured the painful difficulty of the choice facing the Senate. Serving his tenth year in the Senate, Eagleton said that he had “agonized over the decision which is thrust upon us more than any I can recall.” He concluded that it was “better to give the Saudis a means to defend against attacks on their vital resources,” rather than send in American forces to do it.

  The debate was deeply emotional. When the ten hours that had been set aside for debate ended, the Senate voted 54 to 44 to defeat the Biden resolution of disapproval. The arms sale would go through intact. AIPAC had lost its first vote.

  The process of approving the arms sale had been a wrenching experience for the Senate and the Carter administration alike. Paul Sarbanes, who had earned great respect for his work on the Panama Canal treaties, sharply criticized the Carter administration’s “skill and competence in the art of government” in the way the package had been handled.

  In retrospect, this criticism seems unjustified. If the Carter White House had agreed to separate the arms sales, Congress would have quickly ratified the sale to Israel, approved the sale to Egypt after some consideration, and, quite possibly, rejected the proposed sale to Saudi Arabia. Instead, the Carter administration made changes in the unified package and won an extraordinary and unexpected victory. The Senate, which had fashioned the arms sales legislation that would give Congress a role in this important area of foreign and defense policy, had stepped up and played that role.

  Those who believed that U.S. foreign and defense policy would be more effectively shaped by cooperation between the executive and legislative branches could derive satisfaction from the collaboration between the administration and Senators Baker and Ribicoff. The issue was hard-fought, but not on partisan lines. The White House got the votes of twenty-six Democrats and twenty-eight Republicans, while losing thirty-three Democrats and eleven Republicans. Leading Democratic doves split down the middle. Eagleton, Muskie, and McGovern supported the president; Church, Cranston, and Kennedy went the other way.

  Some issues simply present an agonizing and uncertain choice, yet despite the difficulties and intense political pressure, the senators faced the issue squarely, refusing to engage in obstruction or seek partisan advantage. It was neither easy nor expected that strong supporters of Israel would come down against AIPAC and favor Carter’s proposal. They did it because they were persuaded that it was the right course for the United States, at a time of great fluidity in the Middle East. For these reasons, the arms sales debate showed the Senate at its best. And Jimmy Carter’s position would be vindicated soon enough.

  Just four months later, at the Camp David presidential retreat, Carter would successfully mediate between Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat to bring about the Camp David Accords, which led to peace between Israel and Egypt and the return of the territory that had been captured by Israel from Egypt in the 1967 war. It is impossible to say that the rejection of the F-15 sale by the Senate would have prevented the Camp David accords. However, there is little doubt that the decision of the Senate to support Carter gave a major boost to the president’s stature and credibility as a mediator and peacemaker in the world’s most intractable conflict.

  chapter 10

  AN EPIC BUSINESS-LABOR CLASH

  THANKS TO THE SENATE’S HEAVY LIFTING, THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION had cobbled together an unlikely winning streak: historic foreign policy victories in Panama and the Middle East, and an airline deregulation bill that came to represent a key plank in Carter’s new centrist economic agenda. Now, one of the most contentious domestic issues facing the Senate could no longer be put off. Byrd informed the White House that the Senate intended to take up labor law reform. A third major battle was in the offing.

  Since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American labor movement had been a central force in the Democratic Party. FDR had successfully fought for the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, the passage of which in 1935 had secured the right to organize unions and bargain collectively. In the period after World War II, the Republican drive to curb the rising power of unions became a central political issue. In 1948, union support played a critical role in Harry Truman’s stunning upset victory over Republican Thomas Dewey. Labor’s political power later boosted John F. Kennedy to his narrow victory in 1960, and all-out union support nearly rescued Hubert Humphrey in the turbulent year of 1968, despite considerable rank-and-file sympathy for George Wallace. The time had come for that relationship to be reaffirmed.

  George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, had not been enthusiastic about Jimmy Carter, who had defeated two labor favorites, Scoop Jackson and Birch Bayh, on his way to winning the Democratic nomination. Nevertheless labor had played a strong role in securing Carter’s narrow victory over Ford. The unions provided generous funding and manpower to the campaigns of numerous congressional Democrats as well. Any Democratic administration would have to make time for the priorities of Meany and the union movement. And given the size of the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, labor had every reason to believe that its highest priority, labor law reform, would become law in the Ninety-fifth Congress.

  Labor needed a helping hand from the Congress for, strong as it was as a political force, there were cracks in the foundation. The AFL-CIO was suffering significant setbacks in the workplace. Organized labor’s share of the workforce had fallen steadily—from 34.5 percent in 1956 to 25.1 percent in 1978. Some of Meany’s critics blamed him personally for the decline in union membership. When the AFL and CIO had merged in 1955, union leaders expected that the end of bickering between the two rivals would result in increased organizing. But Meany, a plumber who had never walked a picket line in his life, seemed uninterested in putting labor resources into funding organizing drives.

  Labor’s precipitous decline in the 1970’s also reflected a fierce and concerted campaign waged by the business community. The company most notorious for anti-labor tactics was J. P. Stevens Company, which, by tough and clever legal tactics had blocked the unionization of its textile plants in the south for more than a decade. Farah, a pants manufacturer in Texas, had endured a very long strike by hiring consultants who specialized in defeating union organizing efforts.

  More and more companies intimidated workers by firing union organizers among them. According to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) statistics, the number of employer unfair labor practice charges tripled between 1960 and 1980, and the number of workers ordered to be reinstated because they had been fired illegally increased fivefold.

  To block these tactics and to reverse the decline of labor organizing, the AFL-CIO, led by Meany, sought a labor law reform bill that would increase the penalties on companies that violated the law. Labor also wanted to expedite the arduous appeal processes that companies were using to avoid holding or accepting the results of union elections. The House of Representatives had passed the legislation the labor movement was seeking in October 1977, by a comfortable vote of 257–163. It was now the Senate’s turn to act, and it would be walking into what would prove to be an epic legislative battle between the Democratic majority and an uncommonly unified Republican minority. Meanwhile, the traditional lobbying power of the union movement would have to contend with a new force in American politics—a mobilized, unified business community, armed with innovative political tools and vast financial resource
s.

  At the outset, the chances of Senate passage seemed good, if not quite assured. Its resolve would be tested if cloture, which required sixty votes, became necessary. And in the coming battle, labor’s supporters would discover that their most tenacious opponent was a new Republican political star by the name of Orrin Hatch.

  HATCH’S UPSET VICTORY OVER three-term Utah senator Frank Moss had been one of the bright spots for the Republicans in the otherwise bleak 1976 elections. Moss, a western liberal from the class of 1958, had long been a bête noir for the business community, as a champion of consumer protection legislation throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. Hatch, a self-styled citizen politician, running for office for the first time, was firmly positioned at the leading edge of the New Right conservatism that Ronald Reagan would come to epitomize—vehemently anti-government, strongly pro-business, and anti-labor to the core.

  On arriving in Washington, Hatch quickly became one of the favorites of the right wing and the business community. Still, he was startled at being asked to lead the opposition to the labor law reform bill. The business community had approached other Senate Republicans but had not found anyone who would assume the leadership in this tough, uphill fight. Hatch agreed to take on the challenge, but stipulated two conditions. First, the business community would have to stay united: companies could not make separate deals on the legislation with the unions. Second, if he was going to be the public leader of the effort, the business community would have to agree to follow his leadership and his leadership alone, rather than debate competing strategies.

  This was a moment when the U.S. business community was spoiling for a major fight. The 1950’s and 1960’s had been great decades for American business. Rising economic prosperity had produced a broad middle class and rising demand for all types of products and services. American corporations became global icons, finding markets for their products across Europe and Asia. Certainly, there was some acrimony between labor and management, and corporations could point to plenty of government regulations that they disliked. But generally, shared prosperity made possible a comfortable consensus during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and early Nixon years, in which the interest of corporations and the public were in reasonably good balance. Many leading corporations had no quarrel with the emerging environmental and consumer movements; their corporate CEOs served on the boards of the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution and looked kindly on collective bargaining.

  The situation changed rapidly in the 1970’s. Energy prices rose following the first oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973. Rising energy costs ripped through the U.S. economy, straining U.S. consumers and reducing profits for business. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing companies faced the first onslaught of intense foreign competition. The great U.S. auto companies of Detroit were abruptly losing customers and market share to small, improbable, previously laughable Japanese cars made by Toyota, Nissan, and Honda. Previous decades’ pattern of comfortable prosperity had come to a swift end. In such an environment, the cost of regulation and labor’s wage demands, previously nettlesome but manageable, were becoming serious problems.

  Major U.S. companies had been engaged in Washington legislative battles for years, pursuing their own company or industry interests. Now, in what they perceived to be an anti-business environment, the business community saw a broad common interest in uniting to achieve its goals. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Chamber of Commerce, which had become weak and ineffectual during the 1960’s, refocused their efforts in Washington and expanded their staffs and budgets. In 1972, at the urging of senior Nixon administration officials, a small group of CEOs formed a new organization called the March Club, soon to drastically expand and rename itself the Business Roundtable.

  Lobbying groups weren’t enough, however—business interests needed ideas to power their crusade. At the urging of two powerful intellects, Lewis Powell, the distinguished Virginia attorney soon to be elevated to the Supreme Court, and Irving Kristol, the editor of Public Interest and generally regarded as the godfather of the neoconservative movement, the business community began to fund the activities of a network of policy think-tanks and institutes, of which the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation were most prominent.

  By the time Jimmy Carter became president, the business community had put in place a network of alliances that could bring powerful unified lobbying efforts to bear, coupled with formidable intellectual firepower to make such initiatives credible. From the think-tanks, policy groups, and academics funded by the business community and the right wing, a concerted message, and new ideology, emerged. In essence: government was responsible for America’s ills. Inflation resulted from government deficits, not from the whims of OPEC. Slow growth did not reflect overcapacity, lack of demand, or the recent surge of tough foreign competition. Rather, the growth-killers were government regulations, which increased business costs, government spending, and taxes, depriving the private sector of funds. There was a path to faster growth; all that was needed was rolling back environmental, workplace, and product regulations, slowing wage increases, and above all, cutting taxes.

  This “supply-side” message did not exist in 1971 when Powell and Kristol urged the business community to mobilize. By 1978, it had become pervasive. It reached the academics from the think tanks; the elites through the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Forbes, and Fortune; the public through articles in Readers’ Digest. As Murray Weidenbaum, one of the leading supply-side thinkers said: “We knew we scored when we got into comic strips. You change public understanding that way. Broom Hilda did five comic strips in a row showing OSHA penalizing her for her broom.”

  Nothing reflected the changing political currents more clearly than the shifting fortunes of Mike Pertschuk. For more than a decade, as Commerce Committee staff director, he had been one of the most powerful people in Washington: the embodiment of consumer protection, entrepreneurial policymaking, and liberal activism. Now, as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Pertschuk found himself under siege, as the surging business community painted him as the symbol of the intrusive, costly “nanny state,” and Congress tore into virtually every rule that the FTC proposed. Pertschuk would later write ruefully about the golden days: “We did not appreciate the uniquely benign political environment within which we had the good fortune to operate. . . . We neither contemplated the severely circumscribed, inherent limits to our strategies, nor took adequate note of the lowering clouds of gathering business concern and mobilization.”

  A series of national Gallup Polls registered just how effectively the new conservative supply-side message was being disseminated. Gallup asked whether “you have been better off or worse off as a result of government control and regulation of the business practices of large corporations?” In 1970, 43 percent answered “better off” and only 15 percent “worse off,” with the rest saying “no difference” or “don’t know.” In 1977, the same question produced a response of 28 percent “better off” and 26 percent “worse off.”

  The pro-business message proved particularly successful because the other side, starting with Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Congress, offered no compelling counter-narrative to explain the weakening economy or how it could be improved. The upshot was that the Democratic Senate and the Carter administration would be fighting for labor law reform at a time when public attitudes were moving emphatically in the opposite direction.

  Byrd and his colleagues were certainly aware of the changing climate. In the early months of the Carter administration, one of the AFL-CIO’s other priorities, making common situs picketing legal, had been emphatically rejected on the Hill. A long and bitter strike by the United Mine Workers during the winter of 1977–1978 had made President Carter look indecisive and ineffectual, eroding his public support. But the labor law reform legislation had overwhelming committee support and the support of the majority of the Senate.
Moreover, Byrd was never one to duck a legislative battle—indeed, he relished the chance to demonstrate his parliamentary mastery—and his home state of West Virginia had a long and proud tradition of support for a strong labor movement. He did not intend to be beaten this time.

  IN JANUARY 1978, THE Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee approved the labor legislation by a 16–2 vote. The legislation expanded the NLRB from five to seven members to expedite the processing of unfair labor practice cases. It mandated elections within thirty days after a union presented membership cards signed by a majority of employees. It granted back pay of up to 150 percent for workers illegally fired for union activity. Union organizers would be allowed equal time to address any workers forced by management to attend anti-union meetings. Companies found guilty of violating labor laws would be denied federal contracts. And if the NLRB found that a company refused to negotiate in “good faith” with a newly certified union, its workers would receive back pay. This was the strong bill that the AFL-CIO wanted. But the overwhelming committee vote did not guarantee success in the full Senate; the Labor and Human Resources Committee probably had the most liberal makeup of any Senate committee, attracting members who were pro-labor as well as deeply committed to federal spending on education and health. Byrd, and the floor managers, Harrison Williams, the New Jersey Democrat, and Javits, would have their work cut out for them passing it through the full Senate.

  On May 16, Byrd called up the legislation and announced that the Senate would not be operating on a “two-track” system by which other Senate business could be conducted at the same time. Labor law reform would be the only issue before the Senate. If opponents wanted to filibuster, they would have to be on the Senate floor, actually talking, rather than simply threatening to do so.