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226 33 The Window of Opportunity Slams Shut On April 27, Ceci Connolly in the Washington Post quoted an anonymous tobacco lobbyist: “If the vote were held today, it would be 80– 20 for McCain. But we’re hoping in the next few weeks House leaders will be able to turn things around for us.” House leaders? What had happened to House Speaker Newt Gingrich , who only three months earlier had vowed, “No one is going to get to the left of me on tobacco?” What had diverted the House Speaker who, earlier in the year, came upon Dr. Koop in the House chambers and greeted him warmly: “Just give me a bill, and we’ll pass it.” The congressional Republicans had been liberated by the industry’s success in reframing the issue from the protection of children from Big Tobacco to the protection of working people from the grasping hand of Big Government—liberated to indulge their aversion to regulation and taxation, and to redeem their huge debt to tobacco. Linda DiVall, a Republican pollster, assured their congressional leaders that Congress ’s failure to act to control tobacco would have no resonance— and no consequences in the upcoming elections. Gingrich, on April 21, appearing on CNBC’s Tim Russert Show, trashed the McCain bill: “I think that bill is a very liberal, big government , big bureaucracy bill. And those people that say that’s not a Republican bill; they’re right.” House Whip Tom DeLay scorned the bill in an op-ed article: “Limousine Liberals, by forcing their vision of a healthy lifestyle on American workers, will cost them billions of dollars .” House Majority Leader Dick Armey told his weekly press conference that he did not consider the McCain bill “the appropriate bill.” Asked if he could explain his opposition, he answered, petulantly, “No, I can’t.” Pressed as to why not, he grumbled, “Because I don’t want to.” And who was it that the “House leaders” had to turn around to keep The Rise and Fall of the McCain Bill 227 from being embarrassed and pressed by the McCain bill being sent over from the Senate with an intimidating 80–20 vote? None other than Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who had been uttering increasingly ugly noises about the McCain bill or anything close to it, seeking only to avoid the political risk of appearing to be doing the industry’s dirty work. In this concern, Lott had been reassured by his visit home to Mississippi for Congress’s April recess. Tobacco legislation was not exactly at the top of his constituents’ passionately held priorities. Returning to Washington, he told his first press conference that no one had even raised the issue of tobacco while he was home. “I’m not trying to diminish it, but that’s not number one, two, three, four, or five on the list of things that people ask about.” And as for the Clinton administration’s support for the legislation, “All they have seen in the tobacco settlement,” quipped Lott, “is a cookie jar for them to get money.” But Lott had to find a way to kill the bill without being easily labeled a tool of the tobacco lobby. Burying a bill that had surged out of the Senate Commerce Committee by a 19–1 vote required the subtlest legislative legerdemain. Lott and his colleagues found a way. First, Lott bulldozed the otherwise sturdy McCain by insisting that a tobacco farm amendment authored by Agriculture Committee chair, Senator Richard Lugar, be substituted for the farm provisions of the Commerce Committee bill. The original provisions had been worked out with the Commerce Committee’s senior tobacco-state Democrats— Hollings of South Carolina and Ford of Kentucky—and were far more favorable to the tobacco farmers. This little-noticed maneuver, as the Senate began its debate, left Hollings, Ford, and Virginia’s Chuck Robb feeling abandoned by McCain and lost their hard-won support for the McCain bill. Next, Lott took cynical advantage of the determination of the SAVE LIVES coalition and its allies in the Senate (and the grudging support of ENACT) to eliminate the $8 billion annual cap on industry liability payments—the last vestige of any concession to the tobacco industry remaining in the McCain bill. By striking the caps, the Gregg amendment —cosponsored by conservative Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and liberal Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont—would provide conservative Republicans who were prepared to vote against...

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