Sleazy Riders: Round Seven

It happens every year at this time. Congress loads up spending bills with legislative riders, many of them targeted at the environment. Environmental groups issue howls of protest. Pres. Clinton talks tough and vows to veto the bills. Congress sends them to his desk, anyway. Sometimes an initial veto is laid down, rendering plaudits form the press and genuflections of appreciation from big green, often accompanied by full-page ads with big headlines, blaring Thank you, Mr. President, for standing firm. Then a largely phony fight ensues, while backroom deals are cut. Many of the riders become law and the damage is done, with little notice from the press corps.

This year is different only because the man making most of the decisions is Al Gore, not Bill Clinton. The man making many of these decisions for Gore is George Frampton, the director of the Council on Environmental Quality. Frampton is a Washington fixer, who like Hillary, first came to prominence during the Watergate investigations. Frampton then became head of the Wilderness Society, masterminding its transformation from a dedicated group which retained some of the vision of Robert Marshall and Aldo Leopold, into a gang of Beltway-based lobbyists, lawyers, and accountants. Frampton left the Wilderness Society to join the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of Interior for parks and wildlife, where he helped Bruce Babbitt do an administrative colostomy on the Endangered Species Act.

Frampton is now on the federal dole at the CEQ, where he replaces Katie McGinty, herself a longtime Gorette. The CEQ functions as a kind of switching-station for the administration's environmental policies, interacting with federal agencies, Congress, and the big environmental groups. This time of year the CEQ's power is second only to the Office of Management and Budget.

It is up to Frampton and his associates to review each budget bill for anti-environmental provisions. Then he recommends to Clinton and Gore which bills should be signed and which vetoed. Frampton's office prepares a list of the anti-environmental riders the Administration finds objectionable. This list is then sent to the appropriations committees of the Congress. Then the haggling begins. Or in this case, the winking.

A case in point is the Transportation bill, always a cruise-liner packed with bad riders and porkbarrel spending. Despite earlier pledges of a veto, the President signed the bill on Oct. 20 with barely a mutter of dissent, only days after he announced his hollow plan to study the protection of roadless areas in national forests.

The timing was hardly accidental. Connoisseurs of these ceremonies should have known the fix was in the moment they spotted Clinton arriving to give his speech on roadless areas in a sports utility vehicle, the gas-guzzling bane of the atmosphere. Among other anti-environmental provisions, the Transportation appropriations bill had carried a rider prohibiting any consideration of higher fuel efficiency standards for cars. This meant, among other things, that light trucks, vans, and SUVs would continue to be exempt. On Oct. 8, 40 senators signed a Clean Air Resolution supporting new fuel efficiency standards. This number wasn't enough to eliminate the rider, but it was more than enough to sustain a Clinton veto. At the time, environmentalists celebrated victory. But they said little when Clinton and Gore betrayed them by signing the bill into law.

That same day, Clinton signed the EPA funding bill. This law includes a rider prohibiting the EPA from setting drinking water standards for radium, a known carcinogen. The bill also includes provisions delaying the implementation of storm-water runoff regulations and cleanup plans for polluted waters. Even worse, it contains language that blocks the public's right to know about sources of industrial pollution.

Next came the Defense Dept. appropriations bill, which, aside from offering up billions for the latest edition of Star Wars (which will sink more than 160 Interceptor missiles into the Alaskan tundra), funds a number of Pentagon land grabs which will transform BLM lands into bombing ranges. The Defense Dept. bill also contained a rider which provides military installations--one of the nation's biggest sources of toxic pollution--with civil immunity from fines for or remediation of environmental violations.

While Clinton signed the Defense bill, he vetoed the appropriation for the Commerce, State, and Justice and departments--but it seems that the environment didn't play a big role in his veto message. Instead, Clinton said Congress was slashing too much funding from the FBI's budget. This bill will soon come back to Clinton and it will likely still contain nasty provisions on salmon inserted by Alaska's Sen. Ted Stevens. (Salmon fall under the auspices of the Commerce Dept. because they are an ocean-going fish and are managed by the Commerce Dept.'s National Marine Fisheries Service.) The bill waives the protections of the Endangered Species Act for salmon caught by the Alaskan fishing fleets. Moreover, the bill directly threatens a newly signed Pacific Salmon Treaty with Canada by releasing only $10 million of the $140 million in funds needed to implement the restoration projects in the treaty. Salmon stocks in the lower-48 states won't fair much better. The commerce budget bill slashes salmon recovery funding from $160 million to only $50 million.

Even the spending bill for the Dept. of Health and Human Services comes freighted with environmental riders. For example, as the bill was being wrapped up, Senate majority leader Trent Lott suddenly attached a scrap recycling rider. Lott's measure would provide liability exemptions for certain recycling activities.

But, as usual, most of the mischief is done to the Interior appropriations bill. This year's is perhaps the most outlandish yet. The logic behind this is simple: Congress has learned that the more bad riders they attach to the bill, the more they are going to get signed into law when Clinton compromises. The bill contains provisions that roll over existing federal grazing permits without environmental review and locks in low fees. Another overturns a court injunction and allows hundreds of timber sales to move forward without being analyzed by environmental assessment. Still another rider overturns Judge William Dwyer's recent injunction on timber sales in ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, allowing the Forest Service to okay logging in old-growth without surveys for rare species. Yet another rider halts implementation of a new system for calculating royalties on oil and gas pumped from federal lands.

As always, mining was a big issue for the senators of the interior west--Republican and Democrat alike. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) added a rider in the conference committee report for the Interior spending bill that would halt the Dept. of Interior's cautious attempt to strengthen environmental controls of hardrock mines. The current regulations, put in place in 1981 by Interior Secretary James Watt, have left a legacy of destructive mining that includes costs of several hundred million dollars (paid for by U.S. taxpayers) for cleaning up abandoned mines and a litany of environmental disasters, such as cyanide in drinking water and biologically dead streams. In 1997, the Interior Dept. began a formal rule-making process to revise these outdated regulations. Senator Reid (D-NV) has blocked the process by attaching riders to each year's Interior Dept. funding bill since 1997.

The final version of the Interior funding bill also contains a rider added by Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID). Craig's measure would overturn a court ruling and allow for the increased dumping of mine wastes. The Craig rider would eliminate the "millsite" provision of the 1872 Mining Law (one of the precious few environmental provisions of that archaic law from the age of the Robber Barons) which limits mining companies to a single five-acre waste dump site for every 20-acre mining claim.

Just as the Senate was about to wrap up its work on the Interior appropriations bill, Sen. Robert Byrd limped to his perch in the well of the Senate and threw a tantrum about a remarkable court victory won against the coal mining industry. On Oct. 21, U.S. federal judge Charles Haden ruled that a mining company could not bury its mining waste in valleys containing streams that flow year-round or seasonally. The ruling, which was based on provisions in the Clean Water Act, effectively puts a halt to the latest form of coal mining: mountain top removal. Mountain top removal mining makes strip mining look like laser-eye surgery by comparison. In this technique, mountains are simply decapitated, the coal extracted, and the waste dumped in the nearest valley. More than 470 miles of West Virginia streams have been buried, or will be buried.

In a plain-spoken and tough 48-page ruling, Haden wrote: "Under a valley fill, the water quality of the stream becomes zero. Because there is no stream, there is no water quality." The suit was brought by one of the most tenacious groups in the nation, the Highlander Center.

Sen. Byrd, the coal mining companies' best friend on the Hill, found the judge's ruling irksome and he quickly offered a rider to the Interior bill overturning Judge Haden's injunction. Byrd was backed by Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Nick Rahall. Byrd made calls to George Frampton and the White House and on Oct. 29 Clinton sent word to Byrd that he supported the senator's measure to bail out the coal mining companies and keep tearing apart the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, and, yes, Tennessee. So much for the greatest environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt.