Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [213]
June 18, 1979, was a dull day on the floor of the House, even duller than most. Little was going on, so hardly anyone was there. Bob Edgar was one of the many who were absent, and he still hates himself for it. He was one of the few Congressmen who might have been suspicious enough to stop what was about to take place. “Duncan walked in waving a piece of paper,” Edgar recalls. “He said, ‘Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! I have an amendment to offer to the public-works appropriations bill.’ Tom Bevill and John Myers of the Appropriations Committee both happened to be there. I wonder why. Bevill says, ‘I’ve seen the amendment. It’s good.’ Myers says, ‘I’ve seen the amendment. It’s a good one.’ And that was that. It was approved by voice vote! No one even knew what they were voting for! They were voting to exempt Tellico Dam from all laws. All laws! They punched a loophole big enough to shove a $100 million dam through it, and then they scattered threats all through Congress so we couldn’t muster the votes to shove it back out. I tried—lots of people tried—but we couldn’t get that rider out of the bill. The speeches I heard on the floor were the angriest I’ve heard in elective office. For once, a lot of my colleagues were properly outraged. Senator Baker and Representative Duncan couldn’t have cared less. They got their dam.”
A few days later, the House passed the appropriations bill with the Tellico rider still in it. The Senate followed suit, 48-44, despite two earlier votes against the dam. “That,” said Edgar with sardonic disgust, “is the democratic process at work.”
There was, of course, still the possibility of a presidential veto. If anything, it seemed inevitable. Here in the case of one dam, was everything that was rotten in Denmark: a bad project proposed by a dinosaurian bureaucracy; needless destruction of one of the last wild rivers in the East; usurpation of a quiet valley; and a cynical Congress sneaking around one of its own laws. Guy Martin and Cecil Andrus were both urging a veto in the strongest possible terms. Gus Speth, by then chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, was privately talking of resignation if Carter backed down. Few in Carter’s conservationist constituency even entertained the possibility that he wouldn’t veto the bill. Congress, however, had taken care of everything. Carter was in the midst of negotiating a treaty that would give the Panama Canal back to Panama, and he was meeting stubborn resistance in Congress. The votes were lined up closely enough to put the President in a position of wretched vulnerability. The threats were quite naked. If Carter vetoed the bill, there would be no treaty; his education bill might suffer the same fate. In both cases, his embarrassment would be extreme—worse, perhaps, than if he swallowed the Tellico exemption. The gulp was almost audible. On the night he signed the bill, the President telephoned Zygmunt Plater, the young law professor from the University of Tennessee who handled the case before the Supreme Court, and performed a mea culpa. Plater was taken aback. He was, in fact, speechless, and he wasn’t even sure why. Was it having the President on the other end of the phone, or was it the fact that a dam was not dictating foreign policy?
When the gates closed on Tellico Dam a year or so later, Carter’s humiliation was just about complete. Not a vestige of his water-policy reforms remained. Everything he had asked for was out; everything he wanted out was in. Congress had made a mockery of one of its own