WITNESS TO WHITMAN:
SPECTATORS
NOT CITIZENS
Note: On Tuesday, January 30, 2001, the United States Senate
voted to confirm Gale Norton as Secretary of the Interior,
75-24. Both New Jersey Senators, Robert Torricelli and Jon
Corzine, voted against Ms. Norton. Governor Christine Todd
Whitman was approved by a 99-0 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 if 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