Henry Waxman and climate change legislation
Very interesting profile by Charles Homans of Henry Waxman in Washington Monthly:
It’s a drizzly spring evening on Capitol Hill, and an Indiana congressman has placed himself in an unenviable spot: between Representative Henry A. Waxman and the tobacco industry.
At issue tonight on the floor of the House of Representatives is a piece of legislation that Waxman, a Democrat from California, has been pursuing, Ahab-like, for a decade and a half: a bill that would place cigarettes under the regulatory authority of the Food and Drug Administration. Waxman’s opponent, Republican Steve Buyer, is on the floor pressing for a more industry-friendly alternative: the creation of a new agency called the Tobacco Harm Reduction Center, which would encourage smokers to begin quitting by moving from cigarettes to, say, smokeless tobacco. "You see," Buyer explains, "it is not the nicotine that is killing people—it’s the smoke! It’s the smoke! It’s the smoke that’s killing people." Someone coughs in the back of the room. Buyer doesn’t miss a beat. "I heard somebody coughing," he says. "It’s the smoke! I’m telling you."
Waxman, a former smoker himself, is unfazed. He has been fighting the tobacco wars since Buyer was in law school. His bill is the end point of years of machinations aimed at battering the tobacco industry’s credibility and clout, piece by piece. It was Waxman who, in 1994, hauled seven tobacco-company CEOs before his subcommittee to testify that they did not believe nicotine to be addictive. (Their company scientists, who testified later, said otherwise.) And it was Waxman and his investigators who extracted damning internal documents, one after another, from R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, showing that cigarette manufacturers had knowingly concealed the hazards of what they were selling, documents that set the stage for the multibillion-dollar judgments the companies were forced to pay out a decade ago.
"This Buyer substitute is deeply flawed," Waxman says when it is his turn to speak. "It represents an inadequate response to the greatest preventable cause of disease and death in the United States." He rattles off the names of some of the organizations that support his own legislation: the American Heart and Lung Associations, the American Cancer Society, and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, among others. Buyer’s amendment is whisked off the House floor to make way for (oh, the indignities of life in the minority) a resolution from a Bronx Democrat "congratulating the on-premise sign industry for its contributions to the success of small business." When a roll call is finally taken the next morning, Congress votes for Waxman’s bill, Tobacco Harm Reduction Center not included, by a margin of nearly three to one. The Washington Post runs the story on page A2. What would’ve been unbelievable fifteen years ago seems unremarkable now.
Waxman’s major accomplishments are often like this. His legislative campaigns unfold over spans of time beyond the patience of most lawmakers, and sometimes defy political gravity—in the 1980s, when anything smacking of Great Society liberalism was on the chopping block, Waxman managed to expand the Medicaid program twenty-four times. It is not unusual for him to spend a decade or longer advancing a single policy goal in tiny pieces, forging unusual alliances as he needs them, or simply outlasting his opponents. "It’s the Ho Chi Minh approach," a despairing Republican staffer on Waxman’s committee once told National Review. "If [victory’s] not in the first year, it’s in the fifth."
This year, at age sixty-nine, Waxman has the wind fully at his back for the first time since his early days in Congress a third of a century ago…
