April 28, 2004
Wyden May Have Blown Chance For Forest Plan
Critic at Large
By Les AuCoin
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden’s highly publicized plan for new wilderness in the Mt. Hood forest and Columbia Gorge has won tons of printers’ ink and cheers from conservationists.
Sorry, but I can’t join in the huzzahs for an initiative that has all the earmarks of being stillborn.
On its merits, Wyden’s draft proposal is spot-on. The lands it embraces are rich in beauty and wildlife diversity. As the editors of the Eugene Register-Guard put it so well, 50 years from now Oregonians won’t be wishing they had fewer wilderness areas. Wild public lands can only increase in importance, the newspaper stated, as the population grows and untouched landscapes become more scarce.
The problem, then, is not substance. Rather it is how Wyden has handled the issue. If Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and a spokesperson for Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., can be believed — and I think they can — Wyden blindsided both when he announced his initiative.
Walden’s district holds 60 percent of the lands covered by the draft plan. He learned about the plan in a telephone call not from Wyden but from an inquiring reporter. One of the first rules of politics is to not make a colleague look ignorant in front of the media. It’s no way to win friends and influence political colleagues.
Contrast this to the effort of former Sen. Mark Hatfield to create more Oregon wilderness in the mid-seventies. Hatfield was Oregon’s senior senator, as Wyden is today, but he — like Wyden — was operating in a Congress controlled by the opposing party. Republican Hatfield knew that his plans were doomed unless he could win over at least a majority of Democrats in the Oregon delegation.
So after informing his Republican Senate colleague Bob Packwood, Hatfield walked across the Capitol to the House office of each Oregon representative.
There he laid out maps of his draft plan, answered questions, identified conflicts and welcomed input from his colleagues.
Even then, Hatfield’s proposal failed. But it set the stage for the successful 1984 bill, written by Rep. Jim Weaver, D-Ore., Hatfield and me — three men whom at one time or another had had red-hot feuds with at least two of the others.
Wyden has been around long enough to know that, as in 1984, to enact legislation as sensitive as a wilderness bill you must have some bipartisan support in the delegation. Without it, Republican leaders of the House and Senate won’t let such a bill leave committee, much less permit a floor vote.
Maybe Wyden thought a bolt out of the blue would create momentum for wilderness that Walden and Smith could not resist. But this broke the Second Rule of Politics: Before you run over another politician with a truck, honk first.
Wyden’s chief of staff, Josh Kardon, responded by saying, “Since when do congressional rules require getting permission from others to offer a legislative plan?” Kardon says the issue is whether people “want to discuss wilderness or continue to act surprised.”
No one’s talking about getting “permission.” The issue is the need for advance consultation to make it easier to pass a bill instead of a press release.
It is nearly May, and Congress’s priority is a must-pass appropriations bill before it adjourns in the fall for the election campaigns. It is a calendar where the odds are heavily stacked against action on Oregon wilderness.
Wyden, a canny politician, should know this — which makes his handling of the issue odd, indeed.
Some of Wyden’s harsher critics claim his aim isn’t to pass a bill — that in a re-election year he is just expressing support for wilderness to woo conservationists alienated by his controversial support of President Bush’s so-called “Healthy Forest Initiative.”
Maybe true, maybe not. But nothing so far makes this particular wilderness plan seem designed for passage.
Former U.S. Rep. Les AuCoin is an author and professor in Ashland.