Subject: Sen. Byrd, No Longer the Senate's Chief Pilot, Nevertheless Has Appropriated the Driver's Seat 
Date: Published: 5/24/91 (147 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Politics & Policy:
    Sen. Byrd, No Longer the Senate's Chief Pilot,
    Nevertheless Has Appropriated the Driver's Seat
    ----
    By David Rogers
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    {Second of Two Articles}
    WASHINGTON -- As Senate Democratic leader, Robert Byrd
 would sometimes take the wheel of his official car, driving
 his driver into the night in a quirky joke on himself and a
 reminder of his hardscrabble youth in West Virginia.
    Today, as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee,
 Mr. Byrd is at the wheel again.  His grip on federal spending
 has never been tighter; and in the two years since giving up
 his leadership post, he has made himself into one of the
 major arbiters of national budget priorities stretching into
 the next century.
    Sen. Byrd helped write last fall's five-year deficit
 accord and now implements it.  His partnership with Richard
 Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is
 such that his Senate committee suite is nicknamed "OMB East."
 Satyrs dance amid ancient sea gods on its painted ceiling,
 but the dealings below are earthy, hard-money politics that
 have made Mr. Byrd's name a household word from Turkey to
 Tugfork.
    A half-trillion dollars will be divided up here in the
 coming days in a process that tests not only Mr. Byrd's power
 but also his vision.  Proud and insular, the West Virginian
 embodies the often contradictory world he oversees.  He longs
 for a larger place in history, but his hopes are hindered by
 his own obsession for secrecy and porkbarrel politics.
    Quoting the Sermon on the Mount at a party caucus last
 year, the chairman asked his fellow Democrats, "What man
 among you, whom if his son ask bread, will give him a stone?  "
 Yet "stones" are exactly what Mr. Byrd is best at providing.
 Since taking over as appropriations chairman, he has won
 funding for a succession of federal buildings for West
 Virginia, draining jobs from Washington, which has no vote in
 the Senate.
    In fiscal 1990, he put more money into the Fish and
 Wildlife Service construction for West Virginia alone than
 President Bush had proposed for the entire nation.  And when a
 bitter fight broke out last fall over funding for public
 hospitals overwhelmed by the AIDS crisis, the chairman made
 no move to help by tapping money then sitting idle in
 public-works accounts.
    Mr. Darman generally turns a blind eye to Sen. Byrd's
 parochial politics in return for concessions to the White
 House.  The question for Democrats is whether the chairman's
 agenda serves them as well.
    The current behind-the-scenes negotiations over the
 distribution of fiscal 1992 appropriations underscore this
 question.  The House Appropriations Committee has already
 trimmed back on promised increases in the budget resolution
 for health and education programs, and Mr. Byrd has signaled
 a desire to cut even further in the Senate.
    After three decades in Congress, the chairman is both an
 eloquent champion of the institution and a sharp critic of
 its shortcomings.  Steeped in history, he finds daily lessons
 in Hannibal's battles, but behind his ramblings is a classic,
 deeply felt commitment to the Senate as a public forum.  He
 lashes out at rude White House aides who forget they were
 never elected.  He lectures colleagues on "boyish" posturing
 and making themselves "slaves" to the corrupting influence of
 outside money and lobbyists.
    He is feisty and resentful of any bullying, yet his own
 demands can make fellow senators cringe.  He knows what levers
 to pull, and his use of power is intense and personal.
 Wanting to slow a spending bill last year, he called his
 former aide, now the secretary of the Senate, and had the
 papers held for weeks.  When a staffer drank too much on a
 trip overseas with Mr. Byrd, the senator slapped him the next
 morning in front of others on the plane.
    Secrecy is part of the appropriations committees'
 character, but Mr. Byrd adds a dimension that frustrates even
 friends.  Earlier this year, senior members of the Senate
 panel didn't receive legislation on supplemental-spending
 requests for this fiscal year until shortly before they were
 to meet.
    Controlling information enhances Mr. Byrd's power, but it
 also hides an insecurity about his own knowledge of the
 programs before him.  The "hands-on" former Democratic leader
 pays a price for his years on the floor and away from
 committee operations; he was embarrassed last year when
 forced to admit he hadn't read an amendment offered in his
 name.
    No power is greater than the chairman's influence over how
 money is distributed among the 13 appropriations
 subcommittees -- a decision that shapes all the choices that
 follow this year.  Few calculations are more carefully guarded
 from the public, and apart from roads and infrastructure, Mr. 
 Byrd is cautious in stating his priorities.
    In the past, he has twice made a gesture of cutting from
 his own natural-resources subcommittee, only to restore the
 bulk of these funds in later talks with the House.  In making
 his recommendations now, he appears intent on beefing up
 Justice Department and public-works accounts, in both of
 which he has a homestate stake.
    Since assuming the chairmanship, his list of West Virginia
 projects exceeds $1 billion -- including a costly Federal
 Bureau of Investigation fingerprint facility that now demands
 more money.  His reach extends even to the classified building
 accounts of intelligence agencies.
    Mr. Byrd's tenure as chairman has coincided with a general
 increase in porkbarrel politics, and Republicans are no more
 immune than Democrats.  Sen. Phil Gramm's re-election campaign
 last year featured 30 different radio scripts boasting of
 what he had brought home to Texas.  Rep. Robert Walker, a
 chief deputy GOP whip and a nettlesome critic of
 appropriations, fell oddly silent after the Defense
 subcommittee leadership added $10.7 million last fall to have
 the Army buy unrequested artillery fuzes manufactured in his
 Pennsylvania district.
    Fish and wildlife accounts offer a vivid lesson in how
 interests get money.  The pintail duck, which has suffered
 from droughts in the West, benefits from its following among
 duck hunters ranging from Alaska to Louisiana -- and an
 effective lobby, Ducks Unlimited.  On the other hand, such
 migratory songbirds as the American Redstart -- a warbler
 whose numbers are severely dwindling -- have little political
 support; for years, they were written off under the
 disparaging title of "non-game" birds.
    Enter Democratic Rep. Sidney Yates of Illinois, who after
 reading of the birds' plight, ordered up a response from the
 agencies he oversees with Mr. Byrd in the Agriculture and
 Interior Departments.  Since the birds often winter in the
 forests of Mexico and the Caribbean, a new title was adopted:
 the "Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Program."
 Birdbackers then enlisted Sen. Robert Kasten, a Republican
 who has a ranking position on the Senate Appropriations
 foreign-operations subcommittee that funds the Agency for
 International Development -- and who is up for re-election
 next year in Wisconsin, nature-conscious warbler country.
    Sure enough, AID funds were tapped to help pay for the
 songbird program.  And a federal symposium on the birds will
 be held this fall in, of course, Wisconsin.
    Sen. Byrd would understand perfectly.  "This nation," he
 says, "is made up of local interests."

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