The vote was 212 to 211 (ah yes, we must be in the House).  It was the final tally, and the first time during the voting that the ayes had it.  Midway through the roll call the nays led by as many as 30 votes, but toward the end of the 15-minute voting period, they steadily lost ground.  It was only after the allotted time had expired that the outcome was known.  I wondered how many lobbyists didn't sleep that night.  How many of them thought that if only they had called, lunched, and visited, or briefed, educated, and elucidated, or cajoled, asserted, and argued, just one more time, that the outcome would have been different?  And the stories of how and why some of those "yes" votes were cast, well, maybe you don't want to know.

Actually, in a group as diverse as the House of Representatives, it's not surprising that when several hundred members vote on a particular bill or amendment, that some votes will be based on trust, or loyalty, or affection, or indebtedness to a colleague (or even a staff member).  Representatives are conscientious and hard working, and they are also decidedly human.  It is when the toughest and stickiest issues are under consideration, especially issues that are not in a member's specialty, that human factors are most influential.  Old allies may be rejoined, old enemies may be repaid, loyal staffers my be rewarded, recent information may be believed.

The close vote occurred on an amendment to Superfund, the federal program to clean up abandoned hazardous waste dumps.  The amendment strengthened the Community Right-to-Know portion of the bill, requiring that more materials be covered under its provisions.  Also, more information regarding those materials would have to be made public.  For example, in addition to inventory information, emissions of certain substances of potential long-term health hazard to the air, ground, and water would have to be reported to local health, fire, and police officials.

By the time Superfund came to the floor of the House, I had completed my stint as the AGU Congressional Science Fellow and had been at my current position with the Office of Technology Assessment for several months.  However, I spoke weekly with several House staffers still in the fray.  The fate of Superfund, and in particular the Right-to-Know portions of it, were of keen interest to me because they were issues that I had focused on while at the Subcommittee on Commerce, Transportation, and Tourism of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The chairman of the subcommittee, James J. Florio (D-NJ), was a strong supporter of Superfund and the amendment to strengthen the Right-to-Know provisions.  I'm sure that he and his staff made hundreds of phone calls to garner support for the amendment.  Although Florio was the first person in Congress to introduce a national community Right-to-Know bill (workers are covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA), the amendment was offered by a representative from Minnesota, Gerry Sikorski, a former democrat on the subcommittee, and Robert Edgar (D-PA).

This arrangement had been worked out early in the spring during preliminary political maneuverings for Superfund.  As circumstance would have it, the makeup of Florio's subcommittee, acknowledged as one of the lead subcommittees on Superfund, was not conductive to the strong Superfund bill that Florio wanted to introduce.  To oversimplify, many of the members were either Republican, or came from regions with big oil or chemical industries, which are the industries that are taxed to pay for most of Superfund.  Again simplifying, Republicans don't generally rush to support democratic chairmen, and members are not usually quick to vote increased taxes on their constituents.  Rather than introduce a bill that would be labeled extreme and become the target of all opposed, the chairman suggested to Sikorski that he introduce his own Superfund bill, as ambitious a bill as he liked.  Then Florio could introduce a more moderate bill that could be termed a compromise between Sikorski's effort and the Reagan Administration's proposal.  As it turned out, that maneuvering did little to change the feelings of the subcommittee, but it does partly explain why the Right-to-Know amendment came to be offered by Sikorski; it was more or less quid pro quo.

The hardest fought battle in all of Superfund ended with another close vote, 220 to 206.  As with many important votes, this was a "money" vote.  While the programmatic changes to Superfund were worked out or brought to a vote on the floor, the big question of who was going to pay for the program continued to be hotly debated.  The Ways and Means Committee, the House committee that handles all tax titles, had narrowly voted in favor of a new kind of federal tax, essentially a federal excise tax on manufactured items.  The tax was designed to spread the tax base of Superfund from nearly exclusively oil and chemical companies to all manufacturing industries.

Environmental groups (the Audubon Society, for example) pressed to keep the focus of taxes on the oil and chemical companies, as in current law, and to raise the rates as needed to collect the required amount of money.  The two main committees of jurisdiction (Energy and Commerce, Public Works and Transportation) had set this amount at $10 billion.  Although new funding sources (a waste end tax, for example) were devised and placed in Superfund 1985-1986, the environmentalists wanted the focus to remain on the oil and chemical industries.

The proposed federal excise tax on manufactured goods was characterized as a kind of "value-added tax," and such a tax is anathema to some fiscal conservatives.  They fear that once a federal value-added tax is enacted, it will never go away, and that it will inexorably drain the economic vigor from the private sector.  Consequently, an unusual coalition formed to overturn the Ways and Means taxing provision on the House floor.  Again simplifying, liberal Democrats joined fiscally conservative Republicans to defeat the measure.

Once the bloody battle over funding mechanisms was decided, the final vote of passage for Superfund was a formality; it passed 391 to 33.

Of course, nothing I've mentioned is final; the House and Senate must still go to conference to hammer out the substantial differences in their two Superfund bills.  These include such issues as the extent of the Right-to-Know provisions, the size of the fund, and the funding mechanisms (that's right, taxes again).  Although it's hard to imagine how, I'll be the maneuvering, negotiating, bargaining, and lobbying will intensify from here on out.

Although Superfund and Community Right-to-Know issues constituted my main interests, other topics, often related, were visited as well.  The life of a House staffer is nothing if not varied and the rapidly changing tasks made life interesting.  As spring turned into summer, and as it became clear that my tenure would end before Superfund was decided, shorter-term projects took up more and more of my time.

A member of Congress is continually receiving "dear colleague" letters asking for endorsements of new bills.  Whenever Florio received a "dear colleague" having anything to do with the environment, it was sent down to the subcommittee to be evaluated.  A number of interesting bills came across my desk.

Matthew G. Martinez (D-Calif.) introduced a Methane Control and Reclamation bill for which he wanted Florio's support.  Ideally, Martinez would have liked the bill to have been incorporated into the Superfund bill.  Adding more cares to the Superfund train, however, was always guarded against because it was already so big; hence the methane bill was not incorporated.  However, Florio became a cosponsor of the bill on its merits, and Martinez thought that he might be able to say a good word about Superfund to a fellow Californian on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The startling news that hundreds of thousands of homes in certain regions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York may suffer from naturally occurring high concentrations of radon (and, of course, its radioactive daughters) prompted some members of Congress from the affected regions to propose legislative remedies.  Some wanted access to the Superfund to aid families who had dangerous levels of radon in their homes or had to vacate their homes.  This notion was not widely held, however, and in these days of huge federal deficits, new programs that spend general revenues are difficult to institute.  Thus the chairman did not cosponsor a measure to mitigate radon intrusion in homes, although the Environmental Protection Agency did agree to study the nature and extent of the problem.  With the passage of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction measures, however, the chances of a large federal involvement in this field grows even dimmer.

One measure that received Florio's full support was the "Superfund Cleanup Technology and Research Demonstration Act."  I helped draft the chairman's testimony given before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources, Agricultural Research, and the Environment (of the House Committee on Science and Technology) in support of the bill.  The bill called for allotting a small amount of the Superfund (about $25 million per year) to research and development on ways to evaluate and remediate Superfund sites.  It provided for 10 demonstration areas at Superfund sites where new and innovative techniques would be used to treat permanently the wastes found there.  The measure was incorporated into the Superfund bill that finally passed the House, and it stands a good chance of making its way into the final law because the Senate has a similar provision in its Superfund bill.

The AGU Congressional Science Fellowship provided me with an incredible first-hand view of our legislative process at work.  Along the way I met and worked with many fascinating people from industry, government agencies, trade associations, environmental groups, and even a "congressman" from West Germany.  My respect for members of Congress and their staffs has risen dramatically.  I remain keenly interested in the projects that I worked on over the year and have already benefited from the new perspective that I gained from the experience.

Eric Butler, AGU Congressional Science Fellow, 1984-1985.

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