President Bush rebuked incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott Thursday for his racially divisive remarks last week, and disturbing new revelations about Lott’s record on race relations and wavering support among fellow Republicans raised new questions about whether he could hold on to the most powerful post in Congress.
A new report published by Time Magazine online detailed Lott’s efforts to block integration of his fraternity while he studied at the University of Mississippi. And in a 1984 interview that circulated widely Thursday, Lott expressed strong opposition to the national holiday that had been established to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King.
Based on those and earlier disclosures, a picture emerged of Lott as a 21st century Republican leader who was still fighting battles that his ideological allies had lost in 1865 and in the civil rights era of the mid-1900s. It was a picture that made even past allies profoundly uneasy.
Conservative commentator William Bennett, the self-styled arbiter of American moral decline, said Lott’s comments last week at a birthday bash for Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., were “offensive, repugnant and inimical to what the Republican Party stands for.”
“If Senator Lott can provide a satisfactory explanation for his statement, this entire episode should be forgotten,” said Bennett, the education secretary under President Ronald Reagan, in a statement reported by CNN. “If he cannot, he needs to step down as the Senate majority leader.”
Lott’s troubles began at Thurmond’s bash, where he told the crowd the United States “wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years” if it had followed Mississippi’s lead and backed Thurmond’s 1948 bid for the presidency. And according to other reports this week, Lott made a similar comment in 1980 during a Reagan campaign rally. But Thurmond had openly run in ’48 on a platform calling for segregation of the races. And though Lott has issued a series of explanations, regrets and apologies, the storm has continued to gather force.
Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe criticized Bush for his tardiness in speaking out. “Unfortunately, it took a full week and enormous political pressure for the president to personally acknowledge what the American people have known all along, that Sen. Lott’s remarks are anathema to our democratic [principles],” McAuliffe said.
Of course, McAuliffe did not mention the tardiness of many Democrats in criticizing Lott. Some, like outgoing Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., initially accepted Lott’s first apology Monday, and did not begin to criticize Lott’s remarks until midweek.
Though some of Lott’s dubious history has been reported in past years, the latest controversy has sent reporters sifting through his record on race issues. Those searches have yielded a steady stream of new and rediscovered data that has caused many to question his fitness to lead the Senate.
In his own defense, speaking to CNN’s Larry King Wednesday, Lott said he had a record of promoting diversity in the state’s universities. “I do have a long record of trying to involve African-Americans and supporting our historical black colleges and universities — Jackson State University, Alcorn University — making sure that we had an active intern program to bring African-Americans into the state.”
But Time Magazine published a story on its Web site Thursday detailing a very different history concerning Lott and diversity on Mississippi campuses. The piece details Lott’s fight — ultimately unsuccessful — to keep blacks out of the Sigma Nu fraternity while he was a student at Ole Miss.
“Trent was one of the strongest leaders in resisting the integration of the national fraternity in any of the chapters,” said Tom Johnson, a former aide to President Lyndon Johnson who was a member of the same national fraternity as Lott during his student days at the University of Georgia. “He was against integration.” The fraternity was integrated in 1968.
Salon contributor Joshua Micah Marshall posted on his Web site the full text of a 1984 interview Lott gave to Southern Partisan magazine. In it, Lott refers to the Civil War as “the War of Aggression” and explains his opposition to the “punitive voting rights legislation” Congress passed in the 1980s, and his vote against a national holiday celebrating King’s birthday.
“I would not vote for a new holiday for anybody, including Thomas Jefferson,” he told the magazine. “Look at the cost involved in the Martin Luther King holiday and the fact that we have not done it for a lot of people that were more deserving.”
Democrats including Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., have called upon Lott to step aside as majority leader. A number of conservative leaders, including the head of the Family Research Council and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have joined former Vice President Al Gore, the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights groups in calling for Lott to give up his leadership post. To date, no Republican senators have called for Lott’s resignation, but some, like Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., encouraged Lott to give a major speech to civil rights groups to explain his positions on race matters.
Among those calling for Lott’s resignation is People for the American Way president Ralph Neas. Neas said it is more than just Lott’s recent comments that make him unfit for the post of Senate leader. “The more people find out about his overall record, the more they will continue to speak out,” he said. “This was not an aberration. Throughout his career, Trent Lott has clearly demonstrated an insensitivity and hostility to key civil rights principles and protections.”
Independent political analysts offered similar views Thursday.
“Daschle’s reaction was everyone’s initial reaction,” said Morris P. Fiorina, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “‘Well, that was a dumb thing to say but we all say dumb things sometimes.’ But it doesn’t look like this was off the cuff when you realize he’s said things like that before … This wasn’t a case of a guy tossing off a few beers.”
Can Lott survive as Senate majority leader? “I couldn’t predict that yet,” Fiorina said, “but it seems more serious now than when it first appeared.”
Bruce Cain, a political analyst at the University of California at Berkeley, suggested Lott could survive — but that it might be difficult.
“That will depend exclusively on the Republicans,” Cain said. “If they believe he’s become a major electoral liability, he’ll be thrown out … Without looking at all the data, my guess is that he has become a liability, and they’ll have to get rid of him in the next year or so.”
Salon editorial fellow Laura McClure contributed to this report.
After several days of near silence, some of the nation’s top Democrats Wednesday demanded that Republican Trent Lott step aside as the Senate’s incoming majority leader in waiting, saying that his remarks at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s birthday celebration last week were so racially insensitive that he is unfit for the post.
Lott blitzed the airwaves, expanding and amplifying his earlier apology, and though he insisted that he would not step aside as majority leader, it was unclear whether he would survive the controversy. Several new revelations showed that Lott had made similar remarks in past years that seemed to be thinly veiled regrets that the days of racial segregation were over. Even some Republicans who had supported him earlier this week fell silent, a clear indication that the Mississippi senator is, at least for the moment, politically toxic.
“I wanted to honor Strom Thurmond, the man, who was turning 100 years old. He certainly has been a legend in the Senate both in terms of his service and the length of his service,” Lott said on conservative Sean Hannity’s syndicated radio show Wednesday. “It was certainly not intended to endorse his segregationist policies that he might have been advocating or was advocating 54 years ago. But obviously, I am sorry for my words, they were poorly chosen and insensitive and I regret the way it has been interpreted. This was a mistake of the head, not of the heart because I don’t accept those policies of the past at all.”
Wednesday night, on CNN’s “Larry King Live” show, Lott seemed to say that he was too young to understand the segregationist nature of Thurmond’s 1948 campaign. “I was 7 years old when, you know, Strom first ran for president,” Lott said. “I don’t really remember anything about the campaign.” He said that nobody in his caucus, and nobody from the White House, has suggested he step aside.
Earlier Wednesday, Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and 2004 presidential contender, became the first member of the Senate to suggest Lott was now unfit to lead the upper chamber. “It saddens me greatly to suggest this, but in the interests of the Senate, his party, and the nation, I believe Trent Lott should step aside as majority leader,” Kerry said. “I simply do not believe the country can today afford to have someone who has made these statements again and again be the leader of the United States Senate.”
The latest troubles for the Mississippi Republican began after Thurmond’s bash, where he told the crowd the United States “wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years” if it had followed Mississippi’s lead and backed Thurmond’s 1948 bid for the presidency. There was just one problem: Thurmond ran that year as a segregationist. Lott issued an apology Tuesday, saying: “A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embrace the discarded policies of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Meanwhile, details of Lott’s history on race issues continued to unfold Wednesday. Salon contributor and blogger Joshua Micah Marshall uncovered a friend-of-the-court brief Lott filed on behalf of Bob Jones University in 1981, after the university was stripped of its tax-exempt status for practicing racial discrimination.
It was also revealed Wednesday that Lott’s statements last week were nearly identical to ones made 22 years ago at a rally for presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, where Thurmond was present. “You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today,” Lott said of Thurmond then. Lott explained to Hannity today that those comments were a reference to Thurmond’s support for a strong national defense.
After the Hannity interview, Al Gore, who has been among Lott’s most vocal critics this week, again blasted the Mississippi senator, and formally called on Senate Republicans to choose a new leader.
“It is simply not credible to state that Thurmond’s campaign in 1948 makes him think about national defense. It was a campaign based on segregation,” Gore said. “My guess is that the uneasiness many Republicans are feeling about Lott becoming majority leader will become more pronounced in the wake of this interview. If they act in the best interest of our country and their party, they will select someone else.”
Gore was not the only one turning up the heat Wednesday. But however strong the attacks on Lott, they were too little and too late for some Democratic activists. Donna Brazile, executive director of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute, said many members of her party have been timid in criticizing Lott and now feel it is safe to do so only after Republican voices have joined in the chorus.
“On all of these subjects, we wait to see what the reaction is from the conservatives,” she complained. “That’s what’s wrong with our party: Before we come out with out positions, we have to wait and see what the other party is doing. ”
In many cases, conservative critics of Lott have been out in front of Democrats in calling on Lott to step aside. New York Post columnist Robert George criticized Lott for a record “unmatched by any other current leading Republican of paying homage to a romanticized view of the old South.” That record includes a 1984 speech to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Biloxi, Miss., where Lott proclaimed “the spirit of [Southern Civil War leader] Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform” and Lott’s history of speeches to the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor to the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils of the 1960s. In a 1992 speech, Lott told a group of council members: “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.”
Among the conservatives calling for Lott’s resignation was Salon contributor Andrew Sullivan. “The Republican Party has a simple choice,” he wrote on his weblog. “Either they get rid of Lott as majority leader, or they should come out formally as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans.”
But columnist George also lays the foundation for removing Lott on other grounds. “This is the same Trent Lott who oversaw the continual shrinking of the Senate Republican majority between 1996 and 2000,” George writes. “This is the same Trent Lott who seemed oblivious that a frustrated Jim Jeffords would bolt the party, and hand the Senate over to the Democrats.”
George called for the promotion of Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to replace Lott. Calls to Frist’s office were not returned Wednesday.
Sen. Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who took criticism from members of his party for being to soft on Lott Monday, came out with a new statement Wednesday calling on Lott to “come forward with a fuller explanation and apology. The question Sen. Lott needs to answer is: If he did not mean to endorse segregation, what did he mean?”
Other Democratic leaders who had been silent up to now, including Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, joined the chorus of Lott critics. And leading Democrats broadened their attack Wednesday, demanding that President Bush also condemn Lott’s statements.
But the White House was anything but eager to entangle itself in Lott’s political problems, at least in public. “The president, as I said yesterday, understands and knows that America is a much richer and better nation as a result of the changes that have been made to our society involving integration and the improvement of relations between races,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. “The changes made in the civil rights community have been among the most constructive changes that our society has experienced.”
But when asked whether Bush would denounce Lott’s comments as requested by Daschle, Fleischer deflected the question.
Senate Republican sources say that some members of the caucus are concerned that Lott’s elevation to leader could hurt the image of the party. But as of Wednesday afternoon, no Republican senators had publicly called on Lott to step aside. On the contrary, some, like Sen. Arlen Spector, R-Penn., who has been mentioned as one of the most dissatisfied GOP senators and a potential party switcher, came out strongly in support of Lott.
“I know Trent Lott very well from working with him in the Senate for the last 14 years and can vouch for the fact that he is no supporter of Senator Thurmond’s 1948 platform,” Specter said. “His comment was an inadvertent slip and his apology should end the discussion.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., refused to comment about Lott Wednesday. But on “Larry King Live” Monday, McCain said, “I’ve known Trent Lott for over 20 years and I know he doesn’t hold any segregationist views and he clearly did not mean words like that in that fashion.”
But as the story grew Wednesday, and reporters began digging up new pieces of information about Lott’s past, McCain, like other Senate Republicans, was silent.
Stephen Friedman seemed a sure bet late last week to succeed Lawrence Lindsey as chairman of the Bush administration’s National Economic Council. But then a funny thing happened: Bush critics began praising the appointment, and conservatives who looked more closely found out that Friedman wasn’t necessarily one of them.
By Tuesday morning, word was out that Friedman was not among the true believers who want bigger and deeper tax cuts. His political star seemed to be in full — and possibly permanent — eclipse. By late afternoon, though, anonymous Bush administration sources leaked word that Friedman’s nomination was back on track.
So goes the four-day political rise-and-fall-and-rise of the former Goldman Sachs chairman, who now indeed seems poised to become Bush’s top economic advisor. And the rest of the world is left to wonder what, exactly, Bush is thinking.
When Friedman did not appear, as was first scheduled, at the announcement of John Snow as Treasury secretary Monday, it was clear that Friedman’s selection to the post was in jeopardy. In Tuesday’s Washington Post, an aide who earlier had put Friedman’s chances at 95 percent had downgraded them to 75 percent. And at a Tuesday press briefing, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer had the sound of someone who was backing away from the White House Friedman leak, claiming that he had warned all along that Friedman’s selection was not a done deal.
But later in the day, a “senior White House official” told CNN that a formal announcement on Friedman’s selection could come as early as Thursday afternoon.
So what happened? Administration officials now say that a routine review of Friedman’s portfolio took longer than expected. Other sources said it had to do with Friedman waiting for a clean bill of health from his doctor after a recent bout of undisclosed medical problems. But he also ran into some very public, and very vocal, opposition from conservative economists who tried to derail his selection. Stephen Friedman, they said, was no Milton Friedman, one of the economic intellectual gurus of the Reagan administration.
Bush has made clear that the economic shake-up in part was meant to focus the administration’s message of tax cuts and economic stimulus for the next congressional session. And that is not Friedman’s history. He is a member of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group of deficit hawks founded by former Sens. Paul Tsongas, D-Mass., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H. The coalition has taken issue with Bush fiscal policy in the past, and came out strongly against the administration’s tax cut package.
In a list of fiscal policy recommendations issued last January, the coalition urged that “if it is decided that an economic stimulus bill is needed, it should be carefully designed to have its maximum effect in the very near future, minimize costs in later years, and provide the most bang for the buck. Back-loaded options, whether tax cuts or spending increases, are not the right method of providing short-term economic stimulus.”
And the group had this to say about the farm bill Bush signed earlier this year: “The system is not just costly, but perverse — a textbook case of an entitlement that survives because it is politically attractive, not because it is good policy.”
But one of the coalition’s chairmen cautioned that Friedman’s positions do not necessarily mirror the coalition’s stand on every issue. “It’s not the Concord Coalition being tapped,” said former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who now serves as co-chairman of the coalition. “My views are different than what the majority of the Concord Coalition favors in lots of areas, and I imagine that some of Mr. Friedman’s are too. But it would be my hope that many of the things the Concord Coaltion has been fighting for would be represented by Mr. Friedman to the National Economic Council if he ends up chairing it.”
Kerrey says Friedman has “not been that involved with the Concord Coalition in the last couple of years, or at least I have not seen him that much. I don’t think he’s going to take a job working for President Bush unless he generally shares his views on what ought to be done, and that might be somewhat different than what the Concord Coalition supports. From what I know of Mr. Friedman, he’s not just going to go along to get along.”
But Friedman’s association with Washington’s leading deficit hawks has not impressed the supply-side, tax-cutting advocates who are influential with Bush. “We’ve been promoting and helping to create some of the doubts about [Friedman's selection],” says David Keating, executive director of Club for Growth. “We agree with the president that creative forms of tax relief can stimulate economic growth. You want someone on your team who understands that, and there doesn’t seem to be much to indicate that he’d be a credible spokesman for the president’s message.”
With the administration preparing to fortify its supply-side economic message, it probably didn’t help Friedman much when he got a plug from one of his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, Sen. John Corzine, D-N.J.
“He is intellectually disciplined about how he approaches problems,” Corzine told Fox News Sunday. “I think he’ll be a voice to make sure that you look at our economic issues, with the pros and cons weighed against each other.”
Rudman also endorsed Friedman Tuesday, saying his selection would “bring a note of reality to the budget process.” Then again, this comes from the man whom the White House is reportedly trying to keep off the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chris Edwards, director of fiscal policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, was not overly enthusiastic about the possibility of Friedman heading the council. But, he said, “Even if he comes in with a balanced budget philosophy, if he can be a team player, then I see no problem.”
The roll of the National Economic Council chief is essentially to promote the administration’s fiscal plan, Edwards says. “They’re supposed to be the salesmen for the good ideas that come from the [Council of Economic Advisors] and the Treasury. I wouldn’t be against eliminating the office, frankly.”
And though Friedman may not be the best advocate for new tax cuts, he could be an asset for other major administration economic proposals. While certainly not a tax-cut champion, Friedman and the Concord Coalition have been strong advocates for Social Security and Medicare reform, which will presumably be moved to the front of the domestic political agenda at some point next year.
Bush has long advocated a plan for personal investment accounts, allowing younger workers to invest a small part of their Social Security contributions in the stock market. Many Democrats have dismissed the plan as too risky, and used the issue as a way to try to rally senior citizen support for Democrats come election time.
In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in October, Concord’s executive director Robert Bixby joined the president’s call for change. “Changing demographics make the current pay-as-you-go system fiscally unsustainable and generationally inequitable over the long-term,” Bixby warned. “Social Security reform is on the political agenda not because President Bush wants to change the law, but because the law must be changed.”
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s big mistake came last Thursday, at a ceremony commemorating the 100th birthday of Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. When it was his turn to speak, Lott boasted that his home state of Mississippi had supported Thurmond’s run for president in 1948, and that “if the rest of the country had followed our lead we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”
Thurmond ran in 1948 as an openly pro-segregationist Dixiecrat. Lott’s comment, according to the Washington Post, was met by “an audible gasp and general silence.”
But perhaps even more surprising is how that stunned silence extended all the way to the Democratic Party. By Monday, many black leaders and black organizations had denounced Lott’s remarks. On Monday, Lott said only that his comments “were not an endorsement of [Thurmond's] positions of more than 50 years ago, but of a man and his life.” And four days later, few leading Democrats — including those considering a bid for the 2004 race — were willing to openly criticize the senator.
Even Democrats who condemned Lott’s statements Monday did not mention his former affiliation with the Council of Conservative Citizens. The CCC was the successor to the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils of the 1960s. In a 1992 speech, Lott told a group of CCC members, “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.” When Lott was criticized in 1998 for his involvement, he said he had “no firsthand knowledge” of CCC’s racial views.
Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who will hand the Majority Leader’s position back to Lott at the beginning of the new Senate term in January, said Monday that he had spoken to Lott about the comments and was confident that Lott did not mean to endorse the Dixiecrat policies of Thurmond’s presidential run. “There are a lot of times when he and I go to the mike and would like to say things we meant to say differently, and I’m sure this is one of those cases for him as well,” Daschle said.
When asked if Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., had any reaction to Lott’s comments, Edwards’ spokesman Mike Briggs said only: “We’ve been mulling it over.” Later in the afternoon, the Edwards team finally settled on a statement that called Lott’s comments “wrong” but seemed crafted with an eye toward the all-important 2004 South Carolina primary: “Obviously we are better off because we did not elect a segregationist in 1948,” Edwards said. “To his credit, Strom Thurmond has changed over the years. Sen. Lott’s comments were wrong.”
A spokesman for Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said the former vice presidential nominee had not commented on Lott’s remarks, but that he might do so soon. Calls seeking comment from other Democratic leaders — including Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. — were unreturned Monday. None, at this writing, had publicly condemned Lott’s remarks.
Over the weekend, only Jesse Jackson had called for Lott’s removal as majority leader. “Shame on the Senate for having him as majority leader,” Jackson said. “Shame on the Republican Party if it does not demote him for promoting this mean-spirited and immoral propaganda.”
On the pundit-dominated news shows, as elsewhere, Lott’s comments were downplayed. On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Robert Novak said the media attention to the story “is the kind of thing that makes people infuriated with the media.”
“He thought it was a social occasion,” Novak said of Lott. “He’s thinking what comes to his mind. He’s saying — if you listen to the whole speech, he’s making extravagant statements about Strom Thurmond, as he should on his 100th birthday.” Novak blamed the press of picking “up something that’s said at a birthday party and turn it into a case of whether he should be impeached.”
And the Washington Post’s David Broder (as first pointed out by blogger and Salon contributor Joshua Marshall here) seemed to avoid making too much of the embarrassing gaffe. “As long as [a] racial divide continues, any kind of comment like this on Senator Lott’s part is going to … have all kinds of bad resonance,” Broder said on the program.
On Monday, however, Al Gore spoke up. In an interview with CNN’s Judy Woodruff Monday, Gore said, “It is not a small thing, Judy, for one of the half dozen most prominent political leaders in America to say that our problems are caused by integration and that we should have had a segregationist candidate. That is divisive and it is divisive along racial lines. That’s the definition of a racist comment.”
“Crossfire” host Paul Begala said Monday that the relative lack of attention paid to Lott’s comments “does point out a very interesting difference between the left and the right. But more than the parties, it points to the differences between the right-wing and left-wing media.” Had this been a Democratic mistake, it would have been blasted on Fox News and picked up elsewhere, he claims.
Begala says that the chorus of media voices can have a very real political impact, as he claims it did in the Minnesota Senate race after the death of Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone. “That echo chamber swung the election away from [Democratic candidate Walter] Mondale to [Republican Norm] Coleman,” Begala says. “It was not just the conduct at the memorial service” — which became an openly partisan affair — “but the incredible orchestrated political conduct afterwards that helped turn that race.”
Begala also believes that part of the lack of outrage is a matter of logistics. “The Congress is not here. If Congress was in session, I think you’d hear a greater outcry, and I expect to hear it when they come back,” he says.
But if Daschle and Edwards’ comments — and the silence of most other Democrats — are any indication, it seems likely that if this story has any longevity, it won’t be because of Democratic fire-breathing.
For months, speculation has brewed over which members of Bush’s economic team might be cut loose. The internal fight has been described as a clash of both personality and policy between Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and White House economic director Larry Lindsey. Friday, the speculation ended quickly: Both men resigned, at the administration’s request.
The fight between Lindsey and O’Neill became very public in a column written by Robert Novak last month. Novak, a Lindsey supporter, wrote that Lindsey had been “mercilessly battered and blamed in newspaper accounts for lack of a dynamic Bush economic policy.” Novak blamed Glenn Hubbard, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, as the source of the anti-Lindsey attacks. “Friends of Lindsey are more than suspicious,” Novak wrote. “They claim hard information that Hubbard, on leave as a Columbia University economics professor, has waged a disinformation campaign against his colleague.”
Alan Reynolds, senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute, says that the column may have lead to Lindsey’s dismissal. “This administration does not like to air its dirty laundry in public, period,” he said. “And there was a lot of talk that those ‘friends of Lindsey’ were really Lindsey himself.”
Though talk of a shakeup had been rumored for weeks, the dual exit caught some administration watchers by surprise. Not only is it is the first major retooling of the Bush cabinet, but it also does what Democrats could not do during the midterm elections: focus attention on the White House’s unsuccessful efforts to jump-start the stalled economy.
Democrats were quick to point out Friday that the firings were a tacit admission of what Democrats had tried to enunciate during the midterm elections — and will say as they approach 2004: Bush’s economic plan has failed. Leading Democrats, including many of those who may run against Bush, have called Bush’s 2001 tax cut plan a giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and have called instead for targeted tax cuts aimed at the middle class.
“Firing its economic team is an overdue admission by the Bush administration that its economic policies have failed,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. “However, the fundamental problem is that this administration has no comprehensive plan to get the economy back on track.”
Daschle was not the only Democrat to chime in with “I told you so” choruses Friday. “Congratulations to President Bush,” said Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe. “After numerous unsuccessful attempts, he finally figured out how to make the market go up. He fired his economic team.” (Stock prices began to tumble on Wall Street after new figures were released showing unemployment at an eight-year high. The skid reversed after the “resignations” of Lindsey and O’Neill were announced, and stock prices closed slightly higher Friday.)
Al Gore spokesman Jano Cabrera added: “Al Gore’s been saying for quite some time that the economic team should be scrapped. I think that most Americans realize that this economic team was let go because they did not come out with a viable economic plan. All the economic figures under the Bush administration have been dismal.”
But indications from the White House are that the firings, particularly O’Neill’s, may be anything but a scaling back of the Bush tax-cut plan. Conservatives hailed the removal of O’Neill, viewed by supply-siders as a tax-cut skeptic. Since the midterm elections, Bush has continued his call to make permanent the tax cuts passed by Congress, essentially revising the provisions of his own tax-cut plan, inserted by O’Neill, that called for a slow rollout of the tax cuts.
Given the administration’s continued push for accelerating the tax cut, and its looking to a new series of tax cuts for next year, O’Neill’s dismissal seems to have more to do with the criticisms of tax-cut advocates than the Democrats.
Bush has made clear that his top economic priority is to accelerate last year’s tax cut. The administration also reportedly wants to push for lower taxes on stock dividends, a plan that also engendered skepticism from O’Neill, and to allow larger contributions to 401K plans and personal retirement accounts.
But advocating tax-cut delays was just one strike against O’Neill. As one of the few non-devout supply-side voices on Bush’s economic team, he also had a history of rhetorical stumbles in his time at Treasury. He called the collapse of Enron an example of the “genius of capitalism,” he predicted that stocks would soar after the Sept. 11 attacks, and he turned heads in Washington when he estimated the war could carry a price tag as high as $200 billion, more than double the estimate from the House Budget Committee.
“He was an ineffective spokesman for the administration’s policies,” says Reynolds. “And when he had ideas, they didn’t seem to be very good.”
Lindsey, for his part, raised eyebrows in September when he claimed a war in Iraq could allow the U.S. to control Iraqi oil and drive the price of oil down. “When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add 3 million to 5 million barrels [per day] of production to world supply,” he said. “The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.”
Whether or not that is true — especially if you believe O’Neill’s $200 billion price tag — risking American lives to drive oil prices down was probably not among the White House’s talking points.
Speculation swirled Friday about who might replace Lindsey and O’Neill. Some, like Reynolds, advocate eliminating Lindsey’s position altogether. “That job was basically made for Robert Rubin,” Reynolds says of one of Lindsey’s predecessors (who later became secretary of the treasury). “The president has plenty of economic advisors already. The problem was, they had too many people they wanted to give jobs to and not enough spots to put them in.” Nonetheless, Stephen Friedman, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, is among those rumored to be up for the post.
There has been much speculation about who might replace O’Neill. Among the names mentioned have been Hubbard and Charles Schwab. Also floated as a contender is retiring senator Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican and former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who just this week got Novak’s endorsement for the job. Then again, a plug from Novak might just be the kiss of death.
When Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christie Whitman loosened clean-air rules for power plants and factories last week, it seemed like the first bold move of a White House newly empowered by its midterm election victory to reward its industry friends. In fact, Whitman had the power to make the change unilaterally, and she’d been moving to do so before the GOP took back the Senate — and there was little the Democrat-controlled Senate could have done to stop her.
But the GOP takeover means there will be no Senate hearings to review the new policy, and Democrats who had planned to subpoena EPA documents related to Whitman’s decision — documents they believe would reveal the shoddy science as well as the influence of industry folks lobbying for the move — are now powerless to do so. Thus Whitman’s move is the symbolic opening of a new phase in the battle over the environment: Between an administration that no longer has to worry about Senate oversight when making the regulatory changes its business constituency demands, and an advocacy community that will now have only lawsuits as weapons to battle such changes.
And now, not only is the White House in the symbolic hands of the oil and gas industries, thanks to President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s corporate ties, but so is the Senate. With the GOP takeover, the chairs of key environmental oversight committees went to senators from Western states who owe their political fortunes to those same constituencies.
With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, expect a new push for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, new cuts to the EPA enforcement budget and a major move to weaken the Clean Air Act when it comes up for reauthorization next year. But the real battle over the environment probably won’t come through legislation. Senate rules mean that 60 votes are needed to pass most controversial legislation out of the chamber (should opponents attempt a filibuster), so the administration will still have trouble passing extreme anti-environment bills given the slim GOP margin in the Senate and the power of some pro-environment Republican senators. ANWR, for instance, clearly does not have a filibuster-proof majority. Advocates on both sides of the issue say the chances are about 50-50 whether it would even be able to garner the 50 votes needed for passage. (In the event of a tie, Cheney, who supports drilling in ANWR, would cast the tie-breaking vote.)
Advocates say the Democrats’ loss of the Senate will be felt most keenly when it comes to oversight over the regulatory and administrative changes the administration can make on its own. The White House now has carte blanche to make huge regulatory changes — which almost always means relaxing regulation — without a skeptical Senate to try to keep it in check.
“Our concern is that [Whitman's] clean-air rule rollbacks have been cooked up without any real data,” says Eric Schaeffer, former head of the EPA’s Office of Regulatory Enforcement who resigned last spring to protest Bush administration cuts in the agency’s enforcement budget. “The decision was made off an industry wish list as opposed to trying to understand what the impact on the environment is. Where’s your analysis? Where’s the data? You say you’re the sound science administration, where’s your science?”
The regulations Whitman relaxed were Clinton-era modifications to the Clean Air Act. The act had required that new factories and power plants use the best pollution-fighting technologies available, but exempted existing facilities. Industries got around the rules by simply expanding old plants rather than building new ones, and so the regulations were strengthened to require anti-pollution upgrades along with any significant renovation of existing facilities. Whitman’s decision returned to the old standard.
Before the midterm elections, Schaeffer notes, Sens. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., outgoing chairmen of the Environment and Governmental Affairs committees respectively, were moving to hold hearings on the impending Whitman rule changes, and to subpoena documents relating to the agency’s move. Incoming Environment Committee Chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has already said he will do neither.
“Today’s announcement on New Source Review culminates a lot of work and analysis by both the Clinton and Bush administrations,” Inhofe said Friday. He added he had “long been concerned about the impacts that layers of regulations have had on energy producers and refiners,” not exactly a strong vote for environmental protection.
Inhofe’s rise may be the most dramatic single change in the new GOP Senate. A self-described “extreme radical right-wing conservative,” Inhofe is widely considered a conservative extremist especially on environmental issues, even within the Republican caucus. Inhofe will take the chairman’s gavel from Jeffords, who was seen as a champion of environmental causes. The Oklahoma senator has called for an overhaul of the Clean Air Act, when it comes up for reauthorization next year, saying it puts unnecessary regulations on energy producers who are required to abide by emissions limits in the law. While Jeffords received a score of 76 percent on a recent League of Conservation Voters score card, Inhofe received a zero.
Jeffords advocated for legislation to curb power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, while Inhofe opposes any forced limits on carbon emissions. When the Bush administration set new targets for power plant emissions that environmentalists, including Jeffords, derided as a giveaway to industry, Inhofe criticized the administration’s emissions targets for being too strict.
A look at Inhofe’s political donations offers a clue as to what the incoming chairman’s priorities will be. According to numbers for the Center for Responsive Politics, Inhofe’s top two contributors are the oil and gas and electric utility industries. His voting record reflects the policy priorities of his political donors.
Environmentalists have focused on two other committee chairmen who have poor track records on environmental protection: Incoming Budget chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., and Energy and Resources chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M. From his new perch, Domenici is expected to lead a renewed drive to open the Arctic reserve for drilling. And many expect Nickles, another Western senator from an oil state, to use his power as budget chairman to defund conservation projects and cut staff responsible for investigating and enforcing environmental rules.
Domenici has promised to make drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a priority for his new committee. The fight over ANWR has been a symbolic focal point of the struggle between industry and conservationists for more than 20 years. Democrats, led by presidential contenders Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Lieberman, have vowed to filibuster any attempt to open the refuge for oil exploration. But Domenici has said he may try to exploit Senate rules that would allow a plan to drill in the Alaskan refuge to pass with only 51 votes. Nickles said he is exploring options to exploit that rule with Domenici.
Even with those efforts, it is unclear whether ANWR drilling would get the votes necessary to clear the Senate. The Senate lost an ANWR defender when Sen. Jean Carnahan lost her seat in Missouri, but gained a vote with the election of Mark Pryor in Arkansas. Though Republicans have picked up at least two seats in the Senate, pending the outcome of next month’s Senate race in Louisiana, one of the new GOP freshmen, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, has said he will vote against plans to drill in the refuge.
One thing GOP control of the Senate virtually ensures is a dramatic cut in the budget of the EPA’s enforcement division. Soon after taking office, President Bush slashed the budget, cuts which led to Schaeffer’s resignation. “It became clear that Bush had little regard for the environment, and even less for enforcing the laws that protect it,” he said. But the Senate was able to restore the funding to bring the division back to Clinton-era staffing levels. The Republican-controlled House approved a much smaller restoration, about half of what the Senate had proposed. The issue remains unresolved. But now that Republicans control the Senate, Schaeffer says, the push for full restoration is as good as dead.
“EPA enforcement funding is going to be critical,” says Sierra Club spokesman Allen Mattison. “One of the things that industry wants is for the EPA to have no teeth. If environmental enforcement cops don’t have money to enforce their investigations, polluters get off scot-free.”
Mattison says that while the elections will have some impact on environmental policy, the Bush administration has had the power to make dramatic changes in environmental policy all along. “The question will be whether they read the election results as a mandate to do even more. Our fear is that they’ve been doing all sorts of nefarious things deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, and that they will continue that on the legislative level.”
Environmental protection seems sure to be a rallying cry for Democrats looking to challenge Bush in 2004. Within minutes of Friday’s announcement, Lieberman, Kerry and Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., all released statements criticizing the new rules. Lieberman called on EPA administrator Whitman to “resign in protest” over the changes, which he called “the biggest rollback in Clean Air Act history.” A New York Times/CBS News poll released Friday showed that Americans said they thought that protecting the environment was more important than producing energy, by a ratio of 2-1. That same poll showed, by a 7-1 margin, that Americans think the administration is more concerned with energy exploration than environmental protection.
Mattison found another silver lining in the fact that many of the Republicans elected this year ran as advocates of environmental protection. He points to Coleman’s pledge to side with Democrats on the issue of protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “Wayne Allard, [R-Colo.], Elizabeth Dole, [R-N.C.] and John Sununu, [R-N.H.] all ran claiming to be environmentalists,” Mattison notes. The League of Conservation Voters certainly didn’t agree with Allard’s assessment. They gave him an 8 percent score on their latest scorecard, and named him one of their “Dirty Dozen.” Sununu faired slightly better, earning a score of 36. (Dole was not an elected official and thus had no LCV rating.)
Mattison continued: “The question is, are their actions going to match their words? If they do, we’ll praise them to the heavens. If not, we’ll be shouting from the mountain tops.”
With the Senate now in GOP hands, activists can shout all they want. There just may not be anybody listening who is able, or willing, to do anything about it.
