A Filibuster Ends, but Not The Gas War

Energy enough for a shouting match

Everybody lost at least something. The President looked inept. The Vice President acted like the Senate majority leader's stooge. The majority leader narrowly escaped censure by his outraged colleagues. U.S. consumers may have to pay millions of dollars a year more for natural gas. Even the ostensible winners, the oil and gas lobbies, are sure to see their victory diluted later on. But add to that list of losers another big victim, the U.S. Senate, whose venerable rules were fractured in a resort to steamroller tactics by the Democratic leadership.

It all happened during a convulsive, brawling fortnight of Senate debate on Jimmy Carter's energy legislation. By the end of last week a Senate committee had rejected key parts of the Carter package, and the Administration's salvaging efforts on the Senate floor faced heavy odds. Ultimately, the President could only look to the more sympathetic House to hang tough in the impending showdown between the two chambers over their vastly differing visions of the country's energy future.

The most dramatic--and in many ways disturbing--event of the week occurred on the floor of the Senate, as the leadership moved to choke off a filibuster that was delaying Carter's whole energy package. At issue was the emotional question of whether federal controls should be lifted from the price of newly discovered natural gas that is sold across state lines. The federally fixed price is $1.47 per 1,000 cu. ft. (or m.c.f.); gas that is produced and sold within a state's borders is free of such controls and generally goes for $2 per m.c.f. to $2.25 per m.c.f. As it had done only two years ago, the Senate voted to remove price ceilings on new gas produced onshore (the vote was 50 to 46). The slight Senate margin favoring deregulation is unlikely to impress the House, where an Administration-backed bill calling for a rise in the price to $1.75 per m.c.f., but continued regulation, was approved, 244 to 177, last August.

Thus it is doubtful that a House-Senate conference committee would sustain the Senate position supporting deregulation. What is more, Jimmy Carter has vowed to veto such a bill, and neither chamber would have the votes to override him. Nonetheless, the upshot of the Senate vote is likely to be that while controls will remain, there will be compromises that will send the price of natural gas substantially higher than Carter had wanted--perhaps as high as $2.25 per m.c.f. when a bill is finally passed.

Vice President Walter Mondale and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd blundered as they moved to shut off an eight-day filibuster--a fight that was actually being waged in support of the President's position. The impatience of the principals was understandable--up to a point. Byrd wanted a quick Senate vote, certain that deregulation would win momentarily but lose in conference with the House. He also saw the filibuster as a threat to his developing reputation for running the Senate briskly and feared that the Senate would end up with no natural gas bill at all. The filibuster leaders, South Dakota's James Abourezk and Ohio's Howard Metzenbaum, thought they were helping Carter to get an effective energy bill.

Carter's position was more complex. Presumably anxious to get his program moving, he did not want to discourage such supporters as Abourezk and Metzenbaum, but he also did not want to step on Byrd's leadership prerogatives. In the end, he apparently failed to communicate to anyone his desires on whether to end the filibuster.

The two liberal Senators had exploited a loophole in famed Rule 22, the hard-fought cloture provision for shutting off Senate debate. Just before cloture had been approved by more than the required three-fifths of the Senate, Abourezk and Metzenbaum had introduced no fewer than 508 amendments. Each amendment could thus be called up for a time-consuming vote. The Senate had run through only about 200 of them--and seven days, including one 37-hour session--when serious moves began among the Senate leadership to curtail the filibuster. The two filibuster leaders said they would end the talkathon if Carter asked them to do so. But Byrd advised the White House to stay out of the Senate's business. He would take care of the filibuster his own way. What followed was a unique show of parliamentary force that outraged much of the Senate.

Byrd laid out his scheme at a meeting of key Democratic Senators and Republican Howard Baker, the minority leader. Byrd proposed calling up the remaining 300 or so amendments and immediately getting them ruled out of order. The group decided that Mondale should preside over the session, reading rulings from a prepared script and ensuring that Byrd could hold the floor without interruption while the amendments were being killed.

Arriving at the Senate shortly before 11 a.m. last Monday in his conspicuous two-car caravan, Mondale went directly to Byrd's office, where he was briefed on what he should do and given his script. He raised no objection. "He didn't know anything that I was going to do until he came in here," Byrd insisted later.

Picking up on a rumor that Mondale was about to crush the filibuster, Abourezk scoffed, "Ah, he wouldn't do that." Metzenbaum asked Senator Edward Kennedy about the same rumor; Kennedy too expressed disbelief. Mondale, meanwhile, was also busy buttonholing four Senators considered soft in their support of deregulation: Democrats Quentin Burdick of North Dakota, Wendell Ford of Kentucky and Dennis DeConcini of Arizona; and Republican John Chafee of Rhode Island. The Vice President told them that the President would see them, one by one, if they wished; all four accepted the offer and were whisked off in waiting White House cars.

DeConcini, a freshman who favors gradual deregulation of gas, found Carter's sales pitch astoundingly low-key and polite. "Bet you're tired," the President said. Then he went right into his soft, soft sell. "There may be a key vote on this, and the Secretary [James Schlesinger] and I wanted to talk to you a little about it." As the twelve-minute discussion continued, DeConcini explained that he had campaigned in support of deregulation. "Well, I'm against controls too," Carter said. "I'm just in the position of wanting to ease it on the consumer and so the companies don't make exorbitant profits." As DeConcini apologized for taking up Carter's time, the President said, "I understand, Dennis. I know what constituents are."

That gentlemanly routine changed not a single vote among the four Senators--a far cry from the arm-twisting, lapel-tugging, browbeating style of Lyndon Johnson. Noting that there were half a dozen Senators on the borderline, Consumer Lobbyist James Plug said, "Lyndon would have got at least one vote out of that bunch." Added a friend: "Hell, Lyndon would have got seven votes."

On the Senate floor, meanwhile, the Byrd scheme was pushing toward an explosive conclusion. As Byrd rose, Abourezk walked up the steps to Mondale's chair. "You're not going along with this, are you?" he asked bitingly. Flushed and tense, Mondale snapped, "You can be sure I'm going to do the right thing."

Byrd, reading from his prepared script, began by arguing that the chair was "required to take the initiative under Rule 22 to rule out of order all amendments which are dilatory or which on their face are out of order." Responded Mondale, also plainly reading from a script, "The point is well taken, and the chair will take the initiative."

Frustrated, Abourezk shouted, "Why did the Vice President come up here to make these rulings? Why did that happen?" Implying that Carter had sent Mondale to end the filibuster, Abourezk declared, "I have been told... that all governments lie ... There is one thing I never thought would happen, and that is that Jimmy Carter would lie." Stung, Mondale told the Senate he knew nothing of the plans to shut off the filibuster until he arrived at the Senate that morning. He said there had been no White House deal, adding, "There is nothing more sacred to me or to the President than our integrity."

Then Byrd moved in for the kill. He started calling up amendment after amendment, and Mondale, just as rapidly, ruled each amendment out of order. In just nine minutes, 33 amendments were axed. It was an unprecedented way to short-circuit Senate business, and dozens of enraged Senators leaped to their feet to protest. Mondale stonily recognized only Byrd.

When Maine's Ed Muskie eventually got the floor, he accused the Vice President of arbitrarily creating "a new order of things, a change in the rules." Colorado Democrat Gary Hart charged that "the U.S. Senate has seen an outrageous act.'' Swiftly, the senatorial anger zeroed in on Byrd. By now, Byrd was burning too. Referring to the weeklong filibuster, despite the vote for cloture, he insisted, "I have not abused the leadership's prerogatives. I am trying to keep Senators from abusing the Senate." Byrd admitted that he had taken "extraordinary advantage of my prerogative as leader," but insisted that "one has to fight fire with fire when all else fails."

With that, Byrd backed off. He promised to call up no more amendments for Mondale to knock down. In theory, the filibuster was still alive. But Abourezk and Metzenbaum, convinced that Carter had sold them out and had sent Mondale in to break up the talkathon, had lost heart.

After the emotion-fraught session that broke the filibuster, the rest of the week's actions in the Senate seemed anticlimactic. But they were far from that. For one thing, Byrd and Baker quickly appointed informal committees to propose changes in Rule 22, now shot through with procedural holes. The outcome could have considerable impact on the Senate's jealously guarded tradition of unlimited speech. Then there was the energy bill itself. The day after the filibuster was killed, so was Carter's proposal for keeping price controls on natural gas. While deregulation is all but certain to die in the House-Senate conference, the gas producers will probably get a price ceiling not far below what they had hoped for had all restraints been removed.

Apart from deregulation, the other differences between the Senate and House treatment of Carter's energy package point toward the likelihood that a handful of Senate and House conferees will determine the ultimate outcome. Responding to Speaker Tip O'Neill's expert prodding, the House had passed most of the Carter program intact--and in a single bill. But the Senate has been slicing it up, bit by bit, into a series of bills. The conference committee cannot be assembled until the Senate completes its multiple energy moves, and that could take several more weeks.

The full Senate last week did approve a bill to revise utility rates so as to encourage production and conservation, but it falls far short of what Carter had sought. Its main break for consumers would be a rate cut of roughly 40% for persons at least 62 years old. The Senate Finance Committee failed to agree on Carter's proposal for a tax on crude oil and rejected his plans to tax the business uses of oil and natural gas. The committee also bristled at a White House threat that Carter would use his Executive authority to impose tariffs on imported oil if Congress failed to pass his proposed seven-year $85.7 billion crude oil tax; the committee passed a provision specifically forbidding him from levying such a tariff.

Also at issue are differing definitions on what constitutes new gas, which presumably will qualify for higher prices, and what is old gas, which probably would not rise in price. The House accepted the Carter formula defining as new any gas that flows from offshore wells leased after April 20, 1977, and from onshore or shallow-water wells authorized or drilled after April 20, 1977; such wells also must be 2.5 miles from existing wells, or 1,000 ft. deeper. The Senate more simply defined new gas as that produced from reservoirs put into production after Jan. 1, or extensions of reservoirs already in production.

With the Senate-House conference committee battle looming, Senator Abraham Ribicoff aptly described the Carter energy program as being "in a shambles." Just what kind of package will emerge --first from the Senate, then from the House-Senate conference committee--remained in great doubt.

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