Bush's Stealthy Pursuit of a Partisan Agenda

[Guest guest]

Bush's Stealthy Pursuit of a Partisan Agenda

By David S. Broder | Washington Post

Wednesday, January 2, 2002; Page A13

 

It was a classic stealth maneuver -- and it worked. Two days after Christmas,

with President Bush at his Texas ranch and most of official Washington on

vacation, the White House announced the rejection of regulations that would have

barred companies that repeatedly violate environmental and workplace standards

from receiving government contracts.

 

Few in the press noticed, and those papers that printed anything about the

decision buried the stories on inside pages. But this was no trivial matter. A

congressional report had found that in one recent year, the federal government

had awarded $38 billion in contracts to at least 261 corporations operating

unsafe or unhealthy work sites. The regulations Bush killed were designed to

stop that.

 

This is a classic example of the difference between the parties. These

particular rules were issued at the very end of the Clinton administration,

after being published in draft form 18 months earlier. Former vice president Al

Gore had publicly promised organized labor he would see that they were finished

before he left that office.

 

Business opposed them, and Bush suspended them barely two months after he moved

in, finally killing them last week. The move was a companion to the earlier 2001

action by the House and Senate, both then controlled by the Republicans, in

setting aside Clinton administration regulations on ergonomics, designed to

protect workers from repetitive motion injuries. The Chamber of Commerce and

similar groups led the fight to spike them, too.

 

When I wrote about that action last March, I erred in saying Congress could have

rewritten the rules that business found objectionable, instead of killing the

whole package. Business lawyers later convinced me that would have been

virtually impossible.

 

But when the ergonomics rules were killed, the administration promised that new,

" more reasonable " regulations would be forthcoming. A phone call to the Labor

Department last week elicited the information that no new regulations have been

issued, and no one could say when they will be.

 

That is the game: Kill the rules you don't like quickly and quietly, then take

your sweet time writing new ones. Don't worry about how many strained backs or

stiff wrists people suffer in the meantime. And now, don't worry if the

companies that tolerate unsafe conditions are getting fat government contracts

at the same time.

 

Here's another example of why it makes a difference who is deciding how the

massive power of the executive branch is wielded -- one I also wrote about last

year. Last Oct. 25, 30 Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the Los

Angeles Cannabis Resource Center and shut down its operations. The center had

opened five years earlier, after California voters approved a medical marijuana

initiative. It served patients with doctors' prescriptions to use marijuana to

alleviate the pain and nausea associated with AIDS, cancer and other diseases.

 

The raid was perfectly legal; the Supreme Court has affirmed that federal

anti-drug laws, which cover marijuana, preempt more permissive state laws or

initiatives. But no one has stepped forward to explain how busting up a center

operating with the full approval of the Los Angeles County sheriff and local

officials became a law enforcement priority for the federal government barely

six weeks after the terrorist attacks on this country.

 

Two months after the raid, no one has yet been charged with any crime by the

U.S. attorney's office. But the center remains inoperative, its former patients

forced to seek relief in the black market.

 

The White House complains constantly about Congress's irresponsibility --

sometimes with good reason. But often it is Congress that sets the executive

branch right. As I noted at the time, the Bush budget of last April included a

batch of fiscally cosmetic but phony law enforcement cuts, including a wipeout

of the $60 million grant to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for programs in

public housing projects and high-crime areas, strongly endorsed by local police.

Congress restored almost all those cuts and raised the clubhouse appropriation

to $70 million.

 

Last year, Bush urged Congress to pass a bankruptcy bill that would make it

easier for credit card and auto loan companies to squeeze repayments out of

people. Bills similar to one Clinton had vetoed passed both the House and Senate

but have been stuck in conference -- in part because even the lobbyists were

embarrassed to be pushing them when so many small businesses and individuals

have been hammered by the recession and the aftershocks of Sept. 11.

 

Believe me, if Bush had been able to rewrite bankruptcy rules with a stroke of

his pen, as he did with the contracting regulations, it would have happened by

now.

 

Elections do make a difference.