A Force for Nature: The Third Decade
Newt Gingrich is best remembered for the Contract with America, a crash program of legislative reforms that the Republicans promised to push through in the first 100 days of the 104th Congress. This artfully written document was full of appealing populist rhetoric about reducing regulations, cutting taxes, balancing the budget, and "getting government off people's backs," all of which sounded reasonable and long overdue. It never used the word environment, but its provisions added up to a deliberate stealth attack on 25 years of environmental protection.
Patricia and I were driving back one day from our cabin in North Carolina when I turned to her and said, "Okay. This is the time to have a fight. Let's get started." We brainstormed as we drove along Interstate 81 from Tennessee, up through the Shenandoah Valley and on into Pennsylvania, and by the time we got to New York, I had a plan. We needed to do three things simultaneously: unite all the major environmental organizations into a single powerful force; create a strong NRDC advocacy program in Washington to strip away the rhetoric of the Contract with America and reveal its true purpose; and build massive grassroots opposition to the Republicans' plans. With the advent of the 104th Congress, much of the environmental movement seemed to think the world had ended. To me, it had just begun.
Time was of the essence, however. The Republicans were vowing to act within 100 days, and the Clinton administration was in disarray. While Vice President Gore tried to hold the line on the legislative agenda, the president was less resolute. Wesley Warren, who then worked on President Clinton's Council on Environmental Quality and later became NRDC's program director, recalls, "There was a contingent at the White House that was telling Clinton he needed to reposition himself in the middle and throw something overboard, and they thought the environment could go."
Our immediate priority was to create the new Washington advocacy center, and in Greg Wetstone we found the ideal person to run it. Greg was a graduate of Florida State University and the Duke University School of Law, my alma mater. He had worked for Henry Waxman, the Democratic congressman from California, and had been chief counsel for the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. He knew Capitol Hill inside and out, and he was an avid environmentalist whose favorite activity was cruising the Chesapeake Bay in the family sailboat.
Greg hit the ground running. As he recalls, "On Monday I was invited to testify at the House Rules Committee. I testified on Wednesday, and I finally got the key to the NRDC bathroom on Friday."
He was a brilliant strategist, with a laser focus and a no-nonsense philosophy: Do what needs to be done. For me, he was an invaluable guide to the ways of Washington, especially as I worked to unify the efforts of the leading environmental groups. My hope was that NRDC could provide the kind of intellectual firepower for our side that the conservative Heritage Foundation and the libertarian Cato Institute were providing for our opponents.
The key to Greg's counterattack against the Contract with America was to go through the document sentence by sentence and translate it into clear terms that both lawmakers and the general public could understand. "It was like jumping into the fire," says NRDC attorney Sharon Buccino. "Greg and I did a down-and-dirty analysis of the contract, and 25 staffers contributed their analysis of what it would do to their particular area of expertise. There were funding cuts for the EPA, changes to the Clean Water Act, and riders tacked on to budget bills that cut funding for various programs. It was a sneaky, backdoor way of doing things, and our task was to expose the nontruth of these supposed reforms."
In February 1995 we published our study "Breach of Faith: How the Contract's Fine Print Undermines America's Environmental Success." We launched it with the support of Washington's old environmental aristocracy -- former Democratic senator Ed Muskie of Maine; former senator Robert Stafford of Vermont, a moderate Republican; and former EPA administrator Russell Train, who said the contract would "create a procedural nightmare and endless litigation that would hamstring effective administration of our environmental laws and effectively roll back environmental protection across the board." Which was, of course, its purpose.
Greg drew from the Republicans' own playbook. In 1993 conservative opponents of Hillary Clinton's plan for health-care reform had made a chart showing how the decision-making process would work. It looked like a map of the New York City subway system. Greg prepared a similar chart to show the complexity and expense of Congress's plan for cost-benefit analysis. The legal and bureaucratic labyrinth it would create would magnify the role of big government, not diminish it. It was an early hint of how House Republicans might have overreached and how they might eventually be defeated.
The decisive showdown came over the 1996 budget, when the Republican leadership introduced a string of insidious antienvironmental riders, nearly 60 in all. "They had nothing to do with the budget," Wesley Warren recalls. "They were attached secretly behind closed doors on behalf of polluters who contributed big money."
Congress told the president: if you want money to govern the country, you'll have to cut spending on your favorite programs. Sign the budget or shut down the government.
This time the radicals had gone too far. Moderate Republicans balked at the confrontation. The public saw a train wreck happening, and they saw that the environmental riders were at the heart of it. The 26-member Green Group had brought out the troops over the summer. Eighty-five sacks of mail were delivered to Capitol Hill on the eve of a vote on a new EPA appropriations bill. We had collected a million signatures on petitions demanding the defense of the nation's environmental laws. On November 2, the EPA bill went down to defeat in the House, with 63 Republicans deserting the party leadership.
The government was shut down that winter after Clinton vetoed the budget bill, and the public overwhelmingly held the Republicans to blame. When the president finally signed the bill in April 1996, all of the worst riders had been dropped.
It was probably the single most important environmental victory in United States history. In five months we had turned back an apparently unstoppable attack because public opinion rallied to our side. The 104th Congress had been so extreme, so crude in its tactics, that it had turned the environment for the first time into an issue of burning public concern. "We were ecstatic," Greg says. "Ours was the issue that the new House leadership had lost on."
Republican Congressman Tom DeLay confirmed this when he told the Wall Street Journal, "I'll be real straight with you. We have lost the debate on the environment. I can count votes."