The Advocate (Baton Rouge) - 10/8/2000

DUPLICITY KILLED CARA BILL

Joan McKinney

It's official now: the 106th Congress won't give Louisiana the federal offshore oil and gas royalties that Louisiana congressional delegations have been chasing for 30 years.

The delegation will try to assign blame for this latest defeat. Don't believe any one of them, especially if it's a Republican blaming President Clinton or a Democrat blaming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. Instead, believe everybody. There's blame to go around.

The royalty sharing bill was known as CARA, the Conservation and Reinvestment Act. President Clinton proposed a bill named Lands Legacy, which funded government purchases of land. From the beginning, Lands Legacy was direct competition for CARA.

Like Lands Legacy, CARA had a big land-buying feature. The private property rights movement hated them both.

CARA also funded other environmental and outdoor recreation and historic preservation programs spread among all states. That environmental funding was automatic. Billions in offshore oil and gas royalties would be allocated to the environment every year, and Congress could not refuse to spend the money.

This proposed environmental "entitlement" was a bribe. Lawmakers from oil and gas coastal states (long thwarted in their demand for royalty sharing) vastly expanded the scope of royalty sharing to every state to get enough votes to pass this one thing:

* CARA's creation of a separate, special, big pot of royalty sharing. Called "coastal impact" it was reserved solely for Louisiana and the few coastal states that allow oil and gas drilling in federal waters off their shores.

Inside the White House, CARA attracted strong enemies, principally George Frampton, who's aligned with Vice President Gore and who heads the White House Council on Environmental Quality. They had pride of authorship in Lands Legacy. And they didn't believe that oil-producing coastal states could be trusted to spend federal royalties in an environmentally responsible way. Also a factor were last-minute, property-rights compromises that the CARA coalition negotiated in a bid for conservatives' votes. The provisions could have helped landowners block government purchases of land.

CARA sponsors said they'd scrubbed the bill of any wording that could create an incentive for new oil and gas drilling. Some environmental groups -- such as the Sierra Club and Audubon Society -- said the scrubbing wasn't thorough enough. Like Frampton, they also feared the concessions to the property-righters.

The CARA coalition had its environmental allies, including the National Wildlife Federation and The Nature Conservancy. Maybe these environmentalists didn't much trust the oil states, either, but they'd grown more suspicious of congressional appropriators. For 30 years, the appropriators had not implemented a federal law that said the offshore oil and gas royalties should be spent to protect land and clean water. To these environmental groups, CARA -- even with its kow-towing to oil and gas states -- was the only way to guarantee an annual stream of money for the environment.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., says Clinton and White House Chief of Staff John Podesta decided that CARA was a worthy improvement on Lands Legacy. Both Clinton and Podesta publicly endorsed CARA. But neither specifically rejected Lands Legacy.

In private negotiations with Congress, Frampton pushed for a Lands Legacy approach. Other White House officials (presumably Podesta) were supportive of CARA. Eventually, CARA went down to defeat, and something closer to Lands Legacy survived.

No one believes that the White House's two-track negotiations were an accident. No one believes that Frampton, Podesta -- and probably Clinton -- were ignorant of what the other was doing. Landrieu is so angry that (although she won't confirm it publicly) she's blocking Frampton's official confirmation as director of the Council on Environmental Quality. She's also threatening to put her name on legislation to abolish the council.

Now, on to the role of Majority Leader Lott. Lott not only endorsed CARA, he was a chief co-sponsor.

Of course Lott wanted CARA. It would have given Mississippi a lot of money.

But Lott wanted something else even more: to keep Republican control of the Senate in this fall's elections. That meant supporting the agendas of his most endangered Republicans and letting the endangered go home as soon as possible to campaign.

Lott's western-state Republicans and his budget leaders fiercely opposed CARA. Landrieu proved she had 60 votes for CARA, theoretically enough to shut down a filibuster. But if Lott sent CARA to the Senate floor, he would be rolling some GOP incumbents, and the long procedural fight would rob them of campaign time. Lott repeatedly refused to schedule the CARA bill.

Yes, both Clinton and Lott said they supported CARA. But neither did what was required to rescue it. That was far more than a failure to act. It was duplicity. Both said one thing and did something else.