Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [205]
The intensity of the reaction from Congress and the affected regions was so white-hot that Carter had to move much more quickly than he had reckoned toward conciliation. In a letter to Congress, he chastised its members for authorizing projects that made so little sense, but promised regional hearings on every project in question and invited the leadership to the White House for a talk. It was hardly the kind of talk he had in mind. “All they did was tell him what an idiot he was for doing this,” said Carter’s House lobbyist, Jim Free. “It was like a lynch mob. He was the sheriff throwing calm facts back at them, but they kept yelling at him to release the projects. One Congressman kept banging his fist on the table. They compared him to Nixon—the Imperial Presidency line. They were rude. They interrupted him. And most of them belonged to his own party.”
Despite its best efforts, Congress couldn’t budge Carter. He may have been naive, but he was adamant. Seeing this, Congress, as the New Republic remarked, began “breaking out the high-minded rhetoric that Congressmen reserve for their grubbiest and most cynical undertakings.” Majority leader Jim Wright of Texas, for example, wrote a letter to his colleagues urging them “to help defend the Constitutional prerogative of Congress. The White House,” Wright said, “in trying to dictate [budgetary] line items, is reaching for powers never granted any Administration by Congress.” (This was the same Jim Wright who was one of the key backers of the constitutionally dubious Gulf of Tonkin resolution; it was the same Jim Wright who, in defiance of his own constituents—who had decisively rejected a bond issue to help finance the proposed Trinity River Project—kept sticking money for it back into the public-works appropriations bills.) Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine picked up Wright’s Imperial Presidency line in the Senate—the same Edmund Muskie who was pushing the Corps’ $800 million Dickey-Lincoln Dam on the St. John River even as it was opposed by both the president and minority leader of the Maine senate, by Maine’s two U.S. Representatives, by most of the local newspapers, and, according to several opinion polls, by a majority of the people in the state. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said, “A project is not ‘pork barrel’ to someone who has to shovel black mud ... or see his home swept away.” The most recent flood disaster in Byrd’s state, which killed more than sixty people, was caused by the collapse of a dam, and the West Virginians most immediately threatened by flooding were the homeowners who lived in the valley behind Stonewall Jackson Dam.
Notwithstanding Congress’s threats, Carter continued to move his water reforms along. Simply applying a reasonable discount, or interest, rate of 6¾ percent—still too low, but reasonable—the hit list easily swelled to eighty projects. Vice-President Walter Mondale, who regarded the hit list as a terrible idea from the start, told Carter that a stand against eighty projects would be his last. With reluctance, he and his water-policy staff began a deliberate effort to winnow it down. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway would devour more money, for a more illusory purpose, than anything on the list, but it had to be left alone; even the NAACP was for it. The Red River Project was also to survive; Carter had evidently read David Broder’s column. Animas—La Plata in New Mexico and Colorado offered something to the local Indian population; it would survive. In most cases, Carter was going against his own deeper instincts when he let a project slip by. Once, in the midst of a string of rank political judgments, he called Charlie Warren of the Council on Environmental Quality over to his office. “He spent the first half hour telling Charlie about how outrageously wasteful and harmful some of the projects were,” says one of Warren’s aides. Then, together, he and Warren reduced the final