The Negotiator

by George Mitchell

  It was my first stop on my first trip to Maine after my election as Senate majority leader. It did not get me off to a good start with the good people of Talmadge that I appeared with a large contingent of national press in tow. For eight years I had traveled from one end of the state to the other, almost always with just one aide who did triple duty as advance man, driver, and note taker. Now here I was with a large, noisy, busy caravan, and I worried that the locals would think I’d gotten too big for my britches.

  The only nonresidential structure in town was a small church where a crowd much larger than the thirty who had voted were gathered. Like most Mainers, the pastor who introduced me got right to the point: “Senator Mitchell, abortion was the issue here.” But, also like most Mainers, while direct she was civil, respectful, and willing to listen. When I rose to speak I thanked her. It was not a formality; I was grateful for the manner in which she had set the tone for the meeting. I told the assembled crowd, which obviously included many people from other towns in the area, that I’d come to find out what they thought I was doing wrong, and they had answered my question. While I knew that many of them disagreed with me, I wanted them to hear my views and I wanted to listen to theirs. I explained my position as clearly and concisely as I could. I then said that I respected their views and hoped they would respect mine. I offered to stay as long as they wished, to hear them and to answer their questions. As I expected, while the first few comments were on abortion, many other subjects were raised, and the discussion went well, as several of my answers drew sustained applause. Just when it seemed that there were no more questions or comments and I thought it would be a good time to end the meeting, a husky man with close-cropped hair, who was standing in the rear of the church, spoke up in a loud voice. In a rapid-fire delivery, with an accent that made it clear he was not from Maine, he delivered a blistering attack on me and anyone else who did not oppose any and all abortions, no matter the circumstances. When I tried to respond to his comments he interrupted me and shouted me down. As he continued, his emotion and voice rose and his words grew louder and more insulting. I sensed that the crowd was becoming as uncomfortable as I was and searched for an opening that would give me a chance to interrupt him. It came when he bellowed that President Bush and I were acting like “pimps and prostitutes.” (Unfortunately for the president, he was lumped in with me on the issue, although there were differences in our positions.) I raised my hand and interrupted. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I yelled. “You’ve gone too far. I’ve stood here and taken all of your criticisms and insults, but you’ve gone too far. You’ve had your say, and I’m not taking any more from you.” To my pleasant surprise, some in the crowd applauded, and the pastor brought the meeting to an end.

  By prior arrangement I then went to the basement of the church, where a spread of sandwiches and cookies had been laid out. At first the reporters gathered around me in a way that made it difficult for me to talk with the local citizens. Then a small, elderly woman broke in, walked up to stand beside me, and, without looking at me, said loudly, drawing out her words in a strong Down East Maine accent, “He’s from Nooow Yaaawk!” Without another word she walked away. To her that explained everything.

  I broke away from the reporters and talked with several of the townspeople. Most were friendly and positive. Most disagreed with me on the issue of abortion, but they were grateful that I had come to their small town to explain my position directly to them and to hear their comments and concerns. As I was preparing to leave I spotted the New Yorker across the room and walked over to him. I extended my hand and he took it with a smile and a firm shake. “You’ve got a lot of guts to come here,” he said, “and I admire that.” We chatted briefly, and just before we parted he said, “There’s something you should know. I was career army, an enlisted man, and I always wanted to get an officer. This was my chance and I took it.”

  I never ran for office again, but if I had I like to think that I would have carried Talmadge.

  CLEAN AIR

  I woke up with a throbbing headache, a sore throat, and a very runny nose. On any other day I would have stayed in bed, but March 29, 1990, was not any other day. It was the day on which the Senate was scheduled to vote on an amendment to the Clean Air Act offered by Senator Robert Byrd. For nine years I had struggled to make progress on legislation to deal with the growing problem of air pollution. Now we were on the verge of success. But adoption of the Byrd amendment could mean the end of our effort. The outcome was uncertain; the vote would be very close. I had to be there to speak and to vote against the amendment, no matter how bad I felt. I knew that exhaustion and stress from two relentless, pressure-packed months of negotiating, debating, and voting were contributing factors. But I had to retain my focus, for today and for a few more days.

  The early settlers had spread across a continent that seemed limitless, but the steady increase in population, rapid industrialization, the movement of people from farms to cities, and the invention of the motor vehicle irrevocably changed the lives of Americans. By the time Ed Muskie entered the Senate, 85 percent of our waterways were polluted, as was the air in most large urban areas. Muskie was the principal author of the landmark laws that reversed both trends. Today 85 percent of our waterways are clean and the level of air pollution has been substantially reduced despite increases in the numbers of people and motor vehicles. The assault on air pollution began with the emergence of clear and convincing evidence of its adverse effects on the health of millions of Americans. That led directly to passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which was aimed primarily at automobile emissions. The Act was amended in 1977 to extend some deadlines for compliance, and also to bring under its scope new industrial sites in those areas in which the law’s air quality standards were not being met and to prevent the degradation of air quality in those areas in which the standards were being met.

  I was appointed to the Senate just three years after adoption of the 1977 amendments. It was already clear then that further changes were needed to meet new challenges. On July 31, 1981, I said, in a speech to the Senate:

  The issue of acid rain continues to grow as an environmental, international, and economic problem. . . . It has already been documented that approximately 50 percent of the high elevation lakes in the Adirondack Mountains no longer support fish life . . . as the acidity of these lakes has markedly increased. Maine lakes have undergone a similar change over the past 40 years; an eightfold increase in acidity has been measured.

  For the next nine years I was among a small group of senators who worked hard to bring the issue to the attention of the public and to move legislation forward. Through a series of public hearings and statements on the Senate floor we made some progress in publicizing the problem, but we were wholly unsuccessful on the legislative front. There were many obstacles; among them were the president and the Senate majority leader.13 President Reagan wanted to terminate the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, not improve them. He nearly succeeded on the Clean Water Act, but it survived because the Senate overrode two presidential vetoes. Although Reagan was not as aggressive in trying to end the Clean Air Act, he was adamantly opposed to expanding or improving it. Senator Byrd did not share Reagan’s broad hostility to regulation but was concerned about and protective of West Virginia interests, in particular the jobs of coal miners. Clean air legislation was seen as a threat to those miners, especially any action on acid rain. The principal objective of the proponents of legislation, like me, was to reduce the amount of sulfur emitted from midwestern power plants, many of which burned high-sulfur coal from West Virginia. Over the decade of the 1980s evidence had accumulated that emissions from those plants were being deposited in the lakes and streams of the northeastern states and the provinces of eastern Canada. The Canadian government, alarmed by the acidification of its waters, actively urged a reduction in emissions. But the possibility of action remained remote. Then came the elections of 1988.

  During my campaign for majority l
eader I made it clear to my Democratic colleagues that if elected I intended to vigorously pursue clean air legislation. I did not want anyone to feel misled. Of much greater significance was the decision by the newly elected president, George H. W. Bush, to support clean air legislation. Within a month of his inauguration, in a break with the policies of the Reagan administration, Bush announced that he would propose legislation for a new, more effective Clean Air Act, including action on acid rain. President Bush’s courageous decision made action on clean air legislation possible. Suddenly, dramatically, the question shifted from “Will there be a clean air bill?” to “What will be in the clean air bill?” I was impressed and heartened by the president’s statement. My colleagues on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and I immediately began to prepare for what we knew would be a long and complicated process. But we greatly underestimated just how long and how difficult it would be.

  To highlight the importance of the issue, in June President Bush used the East Room of the White House to outline his clean air proposal. The centerpiece was control of acid rain. Several factors led the president and his advisors to that decision:

  (1) The subject had received the most political attention during the national clean-air debate and for years had been widely discussed on Capitol Hill, though consensus had proved elusive. (2) Resolution of the issue was especially important to Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who had become a confidant of Bush. (3) The solution to the acid-rain conflict offered a market-oriented mechanism that appealed to the administration’s free-market ideological principles. (4) In the end, the debate over acid-rain control became a numbers game that the Bush team knew could be settled with old-fashioned horse trading, at which members of Congress are especially adept.14

  Making an announcement and drafting a bill in formal legislative language are two very different things. When the president sent his bill to Congress in late July its provisions did not fully match the rhetoric of his statement in June. But that did not detract from the importance of his action. We had a serious proposal to consider, and we began immediately. Within days a House subcommittee chaired by Representative Henry Waxman of California, a staunch advocate of strong clean air legislation, held the first congressional hearing on the president’s bill. Waxman, a dynamo of intelligence, energy, and intensity, had been elected in 1974 and was involved in a wide range of legislation on health care, the environment, and women’s rights.

  The relevant committee in the House was the Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Representative John Dingell Jr. of Michigan. Like many immigrants, Dingell’s father, of Polish descent, had changed the family’s original name, Dzieglewicz; he was elected to Congress in 1933. When he died in 1955 his son won a special election to succeed him. John Jr. was the longest serving member of Congress in American history.

  In the Energy and Commerce Committee the bill fell within the jurisdiction of the Health and Environment Subcommittee, chaired by Waxman. Dingell and Waxman are dissimilar in size, approach, and outlook on issues, but both will be judged by historians to be among the greatest and most influential legislators in the House in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Much attention has been paid to their differences, and less than is justified to their similarities. The fact is they both represented their constituencies with a high level of intelligence and energy. It just happened that their constituencies had different interests. Waxman’s district, based in Beverly Hills, is one in which air pollution, and public concern about it, is high. Indeed concern is high in all of California, a fact recognized in the autonomy granted by federal law to that state in air pollution issues. The California Air Resources Board is widely recognized as one of the world’s preeminent public bodies dealing with such issues. Dingell’s district, based in the suburbs of Detroit, is home to automobile manufacturers and thousands of their workers.

  For the previous decade, from my position on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and especially when I served as chairman of the Environmental Protection Subcommittee, I worked with Dingell and Waxman on a wide range of issues. Despite their differences, despite the widespread view among some business and environmental groups that Dingell would oppose any meaningful clean air legislation, I believed that if we in the Senate could somehow pass a bill, Dingell and Waxman would resolve their differences and enact good and strong legislation.

  The Senate does its business through committees; each senator serves on several. When a senator is elected majority leader he (and soon, hopefully, she) may continue to serve on committees and as chair of a subcommittee, but not as chair of a full committee. I therefore could have continued to serve as chair of the Environmental Protection Subcommittee, but I voluntarily relinquished the position, although I continued to serve on the committee. I gave it up because I wanted to concentrate fully on the position of leader and also because I liked and trusted Max Baucus, who replaced me as chair.

  As Dingell and Waxman struggled to move a bill through their committee in the House, Max and I worked diligently to gain approval of a strong bill in the Senate committee. We were greatly aided by several of the other senators on the committee who were deeply committed to the passage of strong clean air legislation. Among them were Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, a Democrat, and John Chafee of Rhode Island and David Durenberger of Minnesota, both Republicans. Chafee and Durenberger were following a long tradition, since abandoned, of Republican leadership on environmental issues. The previous Committee chairman, Republican senator Robert Stafford of Vermont, a soft-spoken and reserved man with a spine of steel, was a staunch protector of the environment and an advocate of clean air legislation; he had helped to keep the issue alive through the previous decade. We all knew that the Senate Committee bill would be the high-water mark for the legislation and that we would have to compromise it down with the White House, so the Committee approved the strongest possible bill in November.

  There were substantial differences between the Committee bill and the administration’s proposal. On every issue, including the major ones—acid rain, smog, toxic chemicals, fuel efficiency standards on motor vehicles to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide—the Committee bill generally required more and faster action than the administration’s bill. The administration estimated that its bill would cost $20 billion a year and that the Committee bill would cost twice as much. We believed that the difference was not that great and that the estimated health costs of $40 billion to $50 billion a year should be considered in evaluating the costs and benefits of the two bills. There also was a significant difference in how the bills would be enforced. The Committee bill relied on the existing regulatory mechanism; it had been in place for years. The president proposed a new, untried, market-based system that he called cap-and-trade.

  I had stated several times my intention to bring the bill to the Senate floor for consideration as soon as possible after Congress returned from its Christmas break. I did so on January 23, 1990, knowing that the technical complexity of the issues meant that we would not be able to move the bill rapidly. Senators, most of whom were not on the Committee that had drafted and reported the bill to the full Senate, needed time to review and digest its contents. I was optimistic and thought it might take two weeks. In fact it took ten intense and difficult weeks.

  Just before I brought the bill up in the Senate, the president sent a letter to Senator Dole setting forth his opposition to several provisions in the Committee bill. For their part the environmental groups suggested ways the bill could be strengthened. I found myself in the middle, trying to find a way to satisfy several competing interests. Almost immediately the environmental organizations proposed and pushed for an all-or-nothing approach. They wanted me to force a vote by the full Senate on the bill as it was reported out of the Environment and Public Works Committee. But everyone knew that would trigger a filibuster; the bill was very complicated and several senators, Democrats and Republicans, would vote against it because th
ey couldn’t accept one or more of its provisions. After a decade of working on the issue I had a good sense of where each senator stood. Not only could we not get the sixty votes necessary to end a filibuster, we couldn’t even get a simple majority of fifty-one. In addition I felt the president had made a good faith effort in advocating for clean air legislation; it would be wrong and unfair to start the process by forcing him into a position of opposition.

  I talked through the situation with my staff, with my colleagues on the Senate Committee, and with Bob Dole. Dole had been through an intense primary battle with Bush for the Republican nomination for president in 1988. On one memorable occasion Vice President Bush was presiding over a Senate debate when Dole, angry about a Bush campaign ad that he felt misrepresented his record, walked up the few steps to the presiding officer’s chair and said to Bush, “Stop lying about my record.” I was standing just a few feet away and was startled, as was Bush. He denied the charge, Dole repeated it, and the incident ended. But it was clear that relations between them were strained. However, once Bush was elected they patched up their relationship, and now Dole was being a good soldier, working to protect the president’s position on clean air. Dole also personally opposed the bill the Senate Committee had produced and made it clear to me that unless some changes were made he would work hard against it. He suggested that he and I meet with some of the key administration officials on this issue. Those involved in the drafting of the administration’s bill included Roger Porter, the principal domestic policy advisor to the president; Boyden Gray, the White House counsel; Bill Reilly, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Robert Grady of the Office of Management and Budget. Throughout the process that followed I talked with all of them and with others, including the president himself and his chief of staff, former New Hampshire governor John Sununu. Our first meeting was with Porter and Grady. Over the following weeks they served as the principal negotiators for the president. They proved to be effective and honorable negotiators. I developed, and retain, great respect and affection for both of them. We had many differences, but we were able to compromise them to a reasonable conclusion through a difficult but fair and responsible negotiation.