New York Press - July 31-August 6, 2002
Hill of Beans Christopher Caldwell
Panhandlers
Florida Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe is up in arms that his Republican counterparts have already gone on the air with attack ads in the state governor's race. He has called on the GOP to stop making them, and on local television stations to stop running them.
What makes Poe mad is that the latest GOP ad attacks both candidates in the Democratic primary-attorney Bill McBride and ex-Attorney General Janet Reno-on the grounds that "no one knows where either candidate stands on the death penalty." Poe has been able to convince the St. Petersburg Times that this is a lie, since each candidate has clearly articulated a position on capital punishment.
So what are their respective positions? Well, McBride says he is pro-capital punishment - but that, if elected, he will declare a moratorium on the procedure, out of fears it is being wrongly applied. Reno says she is anti-capital punishment - but has promised to sign any death warrants that cross her desk, out of respect for the wishes of Florida's duly elected representatives.
That makes it crystal clear, doesn't it? You can vote for the pro-execution candidate who wants to stop executing people, or the anti-execution candidate who wants to keep executing people.
Loggerheads
Something similar has happened at the national level, it emerged last week as the result of language that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle sneaked into a spending bill. Daschle had quietly made an arrangement with the Sierra Club and the National Wilderness Society. The two environmentalist groups would sign off on large-scale logging in the Black Hills. In return Daschle would protect 3000 acres of wilderness and get a moratorium on road construction. The problem was, such logging is illegal under the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which Daschle supports. So Daschle inserted the exemption from federal law-an exemption that applies only to his state-into the federal budget bill.
Republicans' first instinct was to cry hypocrisy. But as Audrey Hudson of the Washington Times pointed out in an excellent piece of reporting last week, they've now found better ways to work the Daschle exemption to their advantage. The recent rash of forest fires have been a propaganda boon for anti-environmentalist senators in the West, who say the fires are due to excess forest growth, which results from too little "thinning"-i.e., too little logging. If those fucking forests hadn't been there in the first place, they would never have burned.
So absolutely everyone now wants in on the Daschle exemption. House Resources Committee Chairman James Hansen of Utah says that "opposing similar solutions for other vulnerable forests in the West would smack of hypocrisy." Colorado Republican Scott McInnis agrees.
The result over the next few legislative sessions is likely to be the routine carving out of such exemptions. NFMA and NEPA will continue to mandate restrictions on logging all across the country. Except in the states where they don't apply. Which is all states.
In other words, federal environmental policy is beginning to look like Florida Democrats' position on capital punishment. (It should be permitted, unless it's not.) Or like the New York state tax code. (You have to pay high taxes, unless you don't.) More and more laws are coming to look like this. (And the laws apply equally to all of us, unless they don't.)