Witness to Whitman – Spectators not Citizens

The Lisa Jackson EPA nomination and upcoming Senate confirmation process has reminded me of the Whitman experience. So I did a little research and came across a splendid essay by my old friend Bill Neil, former Director of Conservation at NJ Audubon Society.

In times like these, I deeply miss Bill’s intellect, friendship, and perspective. As homage to Bill and to set the stage for the Jackson confirmation proceedings, I decided to post his essay verbatim below. It is about our trip to Washington DC to attend the Whitman Senate confirmation hearings.

I will be writing about these issues throughout the Jackson confirmation process.

WITNESS TO WHITMAN:
SPECTATORS NOT CITIZENS
http://www.njaudubon.org/Conservation/pos02-02-spectators.html

Note: On Tuesday, January 30, 2001, Governor Christine Todd Whitman was approved by a 99-0 [Senate] vote. In keeping with the spirit of President Bush’s Inaugural Address we say: May God help the environment.

On Tuesday, January 16th, Bill Wolfe and I set off for Washington to witness Governor Whitman’s confirmation hearing the following morning in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Since both NJ Audubon and the NJ Chapter of the Sierra Club had invested time in creating substantial documents on the “Whitman Experience,” and had submitted formal testimony to the Committee, we felt we owed it to ourselves and our members to follow through and be there first hand for the proceedings. And report on them. Here’s what it felt like – sprinkled, in fitting places, with bold “quotations” in (parentheses) from President George W. Bush’s Inaugural Address.

Despite a decade of Janine Bauer’s admonitions, Bill and I drove to Washington, DC. via the American Appian way, Route 95. I’ve always found it hard not compare this journey, which I’ve made so many times over the past 35 years, to what it might have been like for a citizen of one of the provinces of ancient Rome to journey to the epicenter of that world, especially given the formal architectural echoes given off by so much of official Washington. But it’s good to help maintain perspective too, to drive down New York Avenue into the heart of the capital. It’s impossible not to see part of the Washington ghetto, which, glimpsed from a car, even at dusk, is remarkable for its row-house scale, varied building facades, and alternating pockets of gutted and well kept structures. If one looks closely enough, one can’t but help be struck by the extensive, compulsive use of a vast variety of iron bars and grates covering all the lower doors and windows. What was it like to live under such Fear – real and imagined, of such a scale and scope to be witnessed and measured by ton upon iron ton. And this would be the portion of Washington, DC’s population that was not in formal prisons. Washington, DC is one of those urban places where more than half the young adult black male population is part of the criminal justice system – either in jail or under some type of post jail supervision.

For those who think about suburban sprawl, consider the Washington ghetto, its low-rise scale, especially contrasted with the center of downtown, and relatively underutilized space, since so many structures are abandoned – and compare it to the intense growth of the Virginia and Maryland suburbs 10-40 miles outside the capital. The website of the District of Columbia lists the wood thrush as its official bird, but that has to be a rare sighting today, even in season, inside its boundaries. But getting rarer too in the chopped up woodlands of the surrounding suburban remnants, according to experts. And was it just the luck of the draw, or a slow, predictable downward spiral, that I’ve noticed fewer and fewer red-tail hawks, the “highway” hawk – perched along Rt. 95 – compared to the late 1970’s?

(“In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation’s promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault. Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love. And the proliferation of prisons, however necessary, is no substitute for hope and order in our souls.”)

Note from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: Philadelphia has an estimated 36,000 vacant lots and 54,000 vacant structures; Detroit 46,000 city- owned vacant lots and 24,000 empty buildings; In Trenton, NJ with 85,000 people, 18% of the land is vacant. From Landlines, Vol. 13, No. 1, January, 2001. Any estimates on what the numbers are for Camden, Baltimore, Newark?

Will our new President forgive me, since I’m an ecologist by habits hard to break, if I just extend the method to wonder about the wisdom or efficacy of isolating the fate of children from that of their parents, who, without medical care, in jail or on parole in many cases, and being surrounded by the overwhelming physical facts of the structural ghetto, are to be transformed by an improvement in eight hours of the classroom world – which, no matter how new, or how well tested, is likely to be still immersed in a world of near complete societal neglect? Just a thought about issues avoided in an otherwise good Inaugural Address that never used the words – suburb, ghetto, nature, housing or, “heaven” forbid, the big green “E” – but mentioned citizen(ship) eight times, and child(ren) six. It’s hard to argue against a greater reliance on faith, hope, and better schools for the urban poor, but there is a huge missing context here – as if we would have been content to rebuild Europe in 1947 with a Marshall Plan that focused only on grade schools. Yet it must be a great relief and heartfelt change for the President and his advisors to pursue a different policy path than that laid out by some of his predecessors, as outlined in Dan T. Carter’s From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1996), where readers can find some of the missing history and context.

I hope my environmental readers will forgive me for seemingly getting away from the track, but in truth, it is part of the track, because the hardest question for Governor Whitman, and perhaps her most passionate confirmation opposition, came from those upset at her record on racial profiling, her nighttime frisk in Camden, and her endorsement of a seven-job generating cement plant for that same down and out NJ town. It was Al Sharpton’s silent appearance at the hearing, not that of any national environmental group, or least of all, that of yours’ truly, that must have set Whitman operative hearts aflutter with visions of a confirmation stumble. But not to worry, the great, warm blanket of Senate civility smothered all the potential sparks from dissenting voices. But that’s a bit ahead of the story.

We got our wake up call from the hotel at 5:30 am and we were descending the steepest Metro station stairs in the capital at Dupont Circle at about 6:45 and soon on our way to the huge Dirksen Senate Office building across town. Instead of the expected lines, the guards hadn’t even opened the building to screen the visitors. But when they did, I got the sternest frisking I’ve ever received – made to walk back through the electronic arch twice, with my hands over my heads, the alarm going off due to my belt buckle, my overcoat dusted down, … yelled at and glared at by a guard who seemed to be in a terrible mood before the crowds had even arrived…was this a taste, just Jersey deserts, of reverse profiling? I have a very hard time, given the way I was dressed and the early hour, of seeing myself as very threatening to security guards, but as we later found out, it seems that everyone who was there early was a Whitman critic. We had been preceded by Rae Roeder and her delegation of 22 Communication Workers of America from Local 1033 in Trenton, wearing deep purple CWA T-shirts, who had left by bus at 3:00 am – and they obviously were not there to give Whitman a standing ovation when she walked into Room 406 for the hearing.

So by 7:30, there were only the Whitman critics and a few camera crews in the hearing room, so we decided to sit down and hold our seats before the crowd arrived. It must have been 8:30 or so, and well after a line had begun forming in the hallway outside 406 that an armed guard in a dark uniform, more black than blue, from the Washington building security service, arrived to order us, in a none-too-friendly tone, to get out of the hearing room and to the “back of the line.” Of course the unfairness of the order, as well as the manner, didn’t sit too well with us, and it was soon apparent that we had made a tactical blunder by entering the room early in the first place. Because the line now had about 100 people in it, there was a good chance, despite having been the first to arrive, that we were not going to get into the tiny hearing room. Some reward for a 5:30 am work ethic.

(“America, at its best, matches a commitment to principle with a concern for civility. A civil society demands from each of us good will and respect, fair dealing and forgiveness.”)

We were soon to see how forgiveness and fair dealing were to be worked out, behind our backs, so to speak. Despite heated entreaties to Senate staff, including a direct plea to Senator Corzine himself, and rather more pointed exchanges to obtain the guard’s name and serial number for future filings, it looked like we were now lost in the middle of the line, chatting with industry lobbyists, and fittingly, a friendly one from Honda, which is ahead of the curve of American auto makers in breaking the mileage/energy targets. As fate would have it, the aggressive guard had tossed us into the midst of the line – now numbering about 250 people, at exactly the point where the inner circle Whitman entourage (Michael Torpey, Eileen McGinnis, Bob Shinn, Senator Torricelli, Peter McDonough, and the Governor herself, looking subdued in a dark burgundy suit) would emerge from another room and enter the hearing room itself. It was worth the drive and the 5:30 am start just to see the expressions on their faces as they walked out into the corridor, on coronation day, only to be inches from the noses of their most dogged home state (now smiling) domestic critics…For handlers so desirous of keeping this Governor in the safest and most controlled of formats, this must have been painful indignity indeed… “How in the world did these two know where we would be?” We hope that they could later take at least some solace from the words of President Bush’s speech, that

(“‘We know the race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?'”)

The tone for the hearing itself, which we witnessed, despite our best efforts, not from the hearing room, but from a large TV-spillover room down the hall (419), was set by the senior Senator from NJ, Robert Torricelli. From his laudatory introductory comments, one would never know that this was the same Senator who in late August of 1997, had to listen to hours of our Whitman laments during one of his canoe outings along the Delaware River, an outing which came just in the wake of the grand battle over the proposed revision (gutting) of New Jersey’s water regulations – the one where protestors had famously dogged one of Whitman’s own canoe excursions. Indeed, any chance for conservationists in the rest of the country to get a fair impression of the controversial Whitman years in New Jersey was probably lost for good when the senior New Jersey Senator jumped at the chance to advance the Governor as a good choice. But then again, he initially thought Senator Ashcroft, with an indisputable zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters, was a decent choice for Attorney General.

(“I ask you to be citizens. Citizens, not spectators. Citizens, not subjects.”)

What are we to make of this whole confirmation process, in light of the call for us to be “Citizens, not spectators?” NJ Audubon contacted the Republican Chairman’s Office (Bob Smith of New Hampshire, a Trenton, NJ native) on January 2, 2001, stating we wished to submit testimony (“Gale Warnings”) and testify on the nomination. We received a prompt return call from Thomas Gibson of the Senate Environment Committee staff informing us that the Democrats were running the hearing, and steering us to the proper people. We didn’t hear back from them until Friday afternoon, January 12th, when we learned that our testimony would be included in the Senate hearing record, but that there would be no panel, no witnesses except the Governor herself. There were news accounts, in the Trentonian, to be precise, indicating that Senator Torricelli played an active role in making sure that this would be the one-sided format. We had been told that this indeed was the Senate tradition, but of course it was broken in the case of Senator Ashcroft. It had been our idea to pursue a panel of NJ objectors to tell the full Whitman story, and we had a nice meeting with Senator Corzine in Newark on January 11th to inform him of our Whitman experience and ask for help in telling the story.

So what is the point, exactly, of Senate confirmation hearings, if the President gets his wish, by tradition, in 99% of the cases? If the purpose is, within these generous and not unreasonable traditions, to share with the country the views of the nominee and render a fair sense of their public service records, then we would have to say the famous senate civility and absence of dissenting panels worked to totally obscure the Whitman record. One did not have to oppose her, or say she should not be confirmed under these guidelines, to render a fair portrait of just how much publicly documented controversy there had been on environmental issues during her nearly two full terms as Governor. The real injustice of the softball questions, and the airbrushed portrait painted by Senator Torricelli, was precisely this: conservationists in Ohio would have little idea of what she did, or what they were going to get, with so little of the Whitman story told through this process. No sense whatever of her attempts to gut wetlands or Clean Water Act laws, and only the mildest form of questions on the effects of staff and budgetary cutbacks at the NJDEP, as well as other controversies from her administration.

(For an interesting portrait of Senator Torricelli, painted long before these events, see Art Levine’s “The Amazing Adventures of Money Man: Is Robert Torricelli the Democratic Party Savior – or its Downfall?” in the April 24, 2000 edition of The American Prospect.)

NJ Network and Public Radio in Philadelphia, so curious in the days leading up to the hearing as to what we might be planning in the way of surprises, showed absolutely no interest in talking to us on the day of the hearing. So there we were, from 9:30 am until nearly 1:30 pm, shunted off to a side room, watching TV, spectators in full. I don’t know how you would feel about going through the same experience, but, since the most vigorous probing we saw that day came as we went through the metal detectors, and we had been tossed out of the hearing room where we had fairly won a place under the previously announced rules of “first come, first serve,” it was a little hard not to feel that we were just subjects witnessing the vast “civility” of the Senate at work.

In terms of citizenship and participation, and the scrutiny of public officials, this writer will take a Jersey City public hearing any day, like the one he witnessed on Saturday, January 27, where Mayor Bret Schundler took the stage in front of 500 hundred citizen-editorialists to try to explain his position on the proposed commercial water park. It was raw, it was raucous, but Mayor Schundler, unlike Governor Whitman, left the center stage with no doubts about how citizens felt about his stewardship of Liberty State Park. If you want a glimpse of passionate democracy, face to face, there’s more of it in two hours of a Jersey City hearing than a month’s worth of Washington confirmation formalities. And you don’t get frisked at the door.

William R. Neil
Director of Conservation
~end~