Category: Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
No Town Left Behind in Terror Funding Flow
WASHINGTON – The town of Bennington, N.H., population 1,273, has one school and five chemical weapons suits.
Bennington bought the suits with some of the more than $6,500 in federal Homeland Security grants it received in 2003 – grants Congress authorized to help New Hampshire’s 234 cities and towns respond to and prevent terrorist attacks.
Towns like Bennington highlight allegations by some government watchdogs and Congress members themselves that millions of taxpayers’ dollars are going to waste in small corners of the country that face little real danger.
The reason: politics.
As congressional leaders rushed to fund anti-terror efforts after Sept. 11, they realized they wouldn’t win enough votes to send money to New York and Washington unless they also provided a little something for every state from Alaska to Wyoming.
And New Hampshire. “I don’t see no specific threats,” said Bennington Police Chief Steve Campbell, whose department has two full-time and three part-time officers. “It was just something they offered, so we figured we’d get on the bandwagon. Even though we’re a small department, we take advantage of it.”
Critics say the current system – which awards funds based primarily on geography and population rather than need – wastes money protecting unlikely targets. They say a system that gives Wyoming, the least populous state, seven times more money per person than New York or Texas is fundamentally flawed.
“It’s almost like an entitlement, like if you’re below the poverty line you get food stamps,” said David Williams, a policy executive for Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based advocacy group that monitors government spending.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has created two main grant programs to help states prepare for terrorist attacks: one that spreads money to every state in the nation and the other that concentrates on areas most likely to come under attack. More than two-thirds of the $2.8 billion distributed by these programs in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was awarded without regard to risk.
The $2 billion State Homeland Security Grant Program sent each state about $15.4 million, regardless of size, population or likely risk of attack. Six U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and American Samoa, received a smaller amount. The roughly $1.2 billion remaining was spread among the states based on population. Under that program, New Hampshire got $17 per person and New York $5 per person.
“The way it’s being done now is not rational, and it has to be changed,” said former U.S. Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican who led an independent task force this summer that evaluated the grant system.
To make up for the imbalance, the Homeland Security Department devised the Urban Area Securities Initiative, which distributed another $800 million to 30 cities based on population density, the presence of potential terrorist targets and real threats intercepted by law enforcement agencies. New Hampshire received no money under this program.
But even with the extra $150 million that New York state garnered through the risk-based program, it still received $4 less per person than New Hampshire.
There’s “a complete mismatch between the funding provided under this program and the need,” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently told Congress.
U.S. Congressman Jim Turner of Texas, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, was less diplomatic. At the same hearing, he called the system “haphazard” and “unfocused.”
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Rachael Sunbarger acknowledged the criticism, but said that New York also receives money from several other programs, many of which existed before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“If everything was just based on the Urban Area Security Initiative formula, then potentially states like New Hampshire and others would get very little from us,” she said. “It’sáa good way to make sure that everybody gets a piece of the pie, and that’s what everybody was shooting for.”
At least eight bills currently before Congress would modify the way the swelling pot of homeland security money is doled out, in part to give a greater share to states that face the greatest threat of attack.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are working to “perfect” a threat-based system to distribute some of the homeland security money, said Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican and member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. But, he said in a statement, it is important to “strike a delicate balance between protecting highly populated urban areas without neglecting still-vulnerable rural areas.”
The Homeland Security Department gave $36.4 million to New Hampshire in 2003, $20.9 million of which came from the state grant program. New Hampshire sent more than $5 million of that to cities and towns based on population. The result: every hamlet in New Hampshire got at least a small piece of the pie.
New Hampshire’s smallest town — Hart’s Location, population 39 — received $182.82. Ellsworth, the second-smallest town with 87 people and no fire department, received $407.82. Manchester, the state’s largest city with a population of 108,078, received more than $626,377.
Campton-Thornton Fire Chief David Tobine, whose volunteer department covers Ellsworth, said the town spent its money on chemical decontamination equipment.
State officials now say that system was flawed. Bruce Cheney, director of the Bureau of Emergency Communications in the state’s Department of Safety, said several committees of emergency workers were tapped to recommend how the homeland security money ought to be divided up and spent.
Initially, he said, “there was some fear that if we don’t send Ellsworth something, they’re going to be complaining that because they’re a little town up north that they got forgotten.”
Pam Urban-Morin, the state’s grant coordinator, said the state did not have enough time to devise a system other than population to dispense the first round of money it received. So, it gave every city and town a percentage equal to its percentage of the state’s population. When the state received more money later in the year, most of it was distributed based on need, she said.
“I think the population grant thing was in the early stages, saying, ‘We can’t leave anybody out.’ And it’s obvious that it didn’t work well,” Cheney said.
Fifty-two New Hampshire towns with fewer than 1,000 people received grants totaling more than $145,000 in fiscal 2003. More than half of New Hampshire’s towns and cities – 121 of them – have populations of less than 2,500. They received a total of $668,000. Another $8 million was earmarked for upgrading radio equipment and distributed according to need.
The largess began when the Office of Homeland Security was elevated to a Cabinet-level department earlier this year and took over nearly two dozen federal agencies. The department began dispensing grants to help states and their first responders – police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and hazardous materials teams – upgrade equipment and pay overtime costs incurred during times of heightened risks of terrorism.
But even some New Hampshire first responders say the decision to allocate money based on population, rather than on the likelihood of attack, was ill-conceived. In some cases, they said a threat-based system would work in their favor.
Durham, home to the University of New Hampshire, is a potential target, said Durham Fire Chief Ronald O’Keefe. So is nearby Newington, which has a large petroleum storage facility, he said.
“And because their population is less than 1,000, they get considerably less money,” O’Keefe said. “Now I think there needs to be a way of distributing it a little more fairly.”
Manchester Fire Chief and Emergency Management Director Joseph Kane said the state did the best job it could under strict time constraints imposed by the federal government. The Homeland Security Department gave states just 45 days to pass some of the money on to cities and towns.
“In that 45-day period they couldn’t have done any kind of risk analysis,” Kane said. A population-based system was the only fair option, he said.
Rudman, the former senator, said that cases like Ellsworth and Bennington are all too common.
“That is very typical of what’s happening all over the country,” Rudman said. “This shouldn’t be a pork barrel; it ought to be something that protects the American people.”
Rudman said pegging more of the federal funds to population density and the presence of critical infrastructure, such as power plants and bridges, is a more effective way to improve security.
But the current system has more to do with politics on Capitol Hill than with keeping Americans safe, said Don Kettl, director of the Project on Homeland Security at the Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank.
In the weeks following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the drive in Congress to give states money to cover new security costs bogged down in arguments over who would get how much, said Kettl, who also is a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. To win votes – particularly from lawmakers who represented areas less likely to be targets of terrorism – congressional leaders had to make concessions, resulting in the rigid geographic and population formulas that allotted some money to every state, he said.
“Whenever it comes time to start writing checks, it’s very hard for a member of Congress to say the money ought to go someplace else,” Kettl said. “We all know that it takes a certain amount of political grease to keep the system running, but the question is how it costs us in distributing money that way to get the kind of protection that we all need.”
The state grant program was outlined in the Patriot Act, a controversial anti-terrorism bill that sped through Congress in the fall of 2001. Civil libertarians have argued that Congress was in such a rush it did not adequately review the bill before sending it to President Bush.
Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican and chairman of House Select Committee on Homeland Security, has introduced a bill that would eliminate the baseline grant. Cox’s bill could significantly cut New Hampshire’s slice of the pie by pegging security money to potential risk.
“If we try to protect everything, we will in fact protect nothing,” Cox recently told his committee.
But politics could again interfere, both on a congressional and a presidential level.
Bush, who is up for reelection next year, might be reluctant to back a bill that would eliminate large chunks of money to many of the states that supported him in 2000.
Last month, Congress approved $22.4 million in homeland security grants for New Hampshire for fiscal 2004, most of it through the grant program that overlooks risk. New Hampshire’s Cheney said state officials have not decided how to divvy up the dollars.
But some New Hampshire officials and first responders are not about to apologize for a system that, so far, has blessed them.
“My view is that New York doesn’t need any money and New Hampshire needs all of theirs,” Cheney said with a laugh. “But I’m sure they feel the same way. There have been many programs in the past from which New Hampshire got nothing,” he said, “So I’m not real sad about the fact that there may be some advantage to us in this go-around.”
Hampstead Fire Chief Chip Hastings was equally blunt.
New York, he said, “had a tragic loss. But when the sun shines we all warm up. If they’re giving, my palms are up because it helps the town and it helps the taxpayers.”
McCain: Gop Looking Dovish on Deficit Spending
WASHINGTON -On the heels of the pork-packed energy bill and a behemoth Medicare expansion, some prominent conservatives are expressing concerns that the Republican Party may be shedding its famously frugal reputation.
Or, as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., bluntly said on television, the GOP-controlled Congress has been "spending money like a drunken sailor."
Congressional Republicans loaded the $31 billion energy bill with three times the amount of tax breaks and subsidies that President Bush originally requested. Critics charged the bill was laden with pork - favored projects intended to garner congressional votes more than to improve the nation's energy system. Congress also voted this fall to spend $400 billion to reform Medicare with a prescription drug benefit, creating the largest new entitlement in decades.
It's the kind of big spending Republicans long accused Democrats of engaging in.
"I think we've lost our bearings," McCain said in an interview. "We've lost our sense of outrage and anger over these egregious spending practicesá..
"First you're outraged, then you condone, then you embrace."
A bipartisan coalition that includes Sens. John Sununu and Judd Gregg, both New Hampshire Republicans, in addition to McCain has temporarily frozen the energy bill in the Senate. Opponents mounted a filibuster to prevent it from coming to a vote, partly because it violates spending limits for the next decade that Congress adopted earlier this year.
But according to hardcore deficit hawks such as McCain and former Sen. Warren Rudman, also a New Hampshire Republican, the energy bill is symptomatic of a GOP that has been fiscally careless in recent years.
The numbers tell the story.
Government spending has grown to $2.17 trillion this year, 16-percent higher than it was when Bush took office in January 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Leading Republicans, including the President, have argued that unprecedented homeland security costs, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as burgeoning entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare have contributed significantly to that jump.
Discretionary spending - money that Congress is not required to spend - has increased 27 percent during the same time period, to an estimated $826 billion. Excluding the military, discretionary spending has increased 22 percent - to $419 billion - since 2001.
By comparison, non-military discretionary spending increased 9.8 percent during the first three years of the Clinton administration, according to the CBO.
All this comes alongside Bush's sweeping $350 billion in tax cuts, which helped turn a $127 billion budget surplus in 2001 into what the CBO estimates will be a $401 billion deficit this year.
And while the CBO predicts that the deficit will swell to $480 billion in fiscal 2004 before being halved by 2006, some spending watchdogs say those estimates may be much too optimistic.
The Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that monitors government spending, recently predicted the deficit could swell to $523 billion next year and reach more than $5 trillion by 2013. The coalition cited as reasons the Medicare bill and the unlikelihood that Congress will allow many of Bush's tax cuts to expire.
"I really find it one of the most incomprehensible things in public policy since I've been in politics," said Rudman, a Concord Coalition founder who fought for balanced budgets throughout his two terms in the Senate. "Republicans suddenly don't care about deficits."
While some critics blame Bush for leading the party away from fiscal conservatism, Rudman said the House and Senate must share responsibility. Although he said the Republican majority is not solely at fault, he added, "We're in charge, so we're either going to get credit or blame."
Rudman said the country is heading for a "fiscal crisis" that will inevitably result in higher taxes, slashed benefits or both.
"We're acting like there's no tomorrow," he said, "and there is a tomorrow."
Fiscal policy expert David Boaz said that neither congressional leadership nor the president have been willing to tie the government's purse strings. Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said the GOP's preoccupation with maintaining its majority has caused it to compromise its core beliefs in favor of "political calculations."
"You do expect that Republicans are put on earth to cut taxes and cut spending, and they're not doing that," Boaz said. "It's always easy to spend money before an election and worry about the future sometime later.
"Part of it is also I think just a loss of any sense that we came here for a purpose," he added, "not just to get reelected."
But Sununu said it's unfair to suggest the entire GOP has strayed from its fiscally conservative roots. Although he opposed both the Medicare and energy bills, he said he did so for very different reasons. Sununu said the Medicare bill didn't solve underlying problems with the program, while the energy legislation was awash in wasteful spending.
"It's an overgeneralization to say 'the party," Sununu said. But, he added, "There's no question that [the energy bill] had little in the way of fiscal restraint, and I don't think it was in keeping with a lot of the free-market principles that should be guiding the Republican Party."
U.S. Congressman Jeb Bradley, R-N.H., who was elected to his first term last year, said Republican spending was driven by world events, particularly terrorism.
"Part of it is the times we live in," he said. "A little over two years ago our nation was attacked very brutally, and that's caused a major realignment in terms of homeland security spending and national defense."
U.S. Congressman Charles Bass, R-N.H., said in a statement he was concerned about current spending levels but that fighting terrorism and nursing the economy back to health were the priorities.
Bass was elected to Congress in 1994 as part of a so-called Republican Revolution that gave the GOP the majority in the House for the first time in decades. The new majority was dedicated to balancing the budget - and pushed Clinton to enact the first one in decades -- though it has been unable to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
"Incumbents, in general, like to remain incumbents," said J. Mark Wrighton, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. "And one way that they may be able to do that is by spending money."
But according to Boaz, of the Cato Institute, voters who elected the current Republican leaders - in Congress and the Oval Office - may be losing patience.
"The people who voted for George Bush thought they were going to get smaller government than if they voted for Al Gore," Boaz said. "And the question is whether they did."
McCain: Time Running Out for Energy Supporters
WASHINGTON - Buried deep down in a multibillion-dollar bill to overhaul the nation's energy program is a provision that would primarily benefit one company: Home Depot.
It is because of pork such as that tax break on imported ceiling fans that the entire $95 billion energy bill should be killed, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Thursday.
"Forty-eight million dollars for a two-year suspension of tariffs on ceiling fans -- what's that all about?" McCain asked incredulously.
McCain said the longer the Senate debates the energy bill, and the more Home Depot-style tax breaks that emerge, the harder it will be for supporters to defend it.
The bill's opponents have charged that it is loaded with pet projects meant to buy votes. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., denounced the bill on the floor for the second consecutive day Thursday, saying it was a "hodgepodge of little interests" that picks winners and losers in different regions of the country based on whether their senators' votes are needed to pass the bill.
Republican leaders have tried to get a quick vote on the bill, McCain said, "because the more of the specifics of this colossus are known, the more people are going to be against it."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., filed a motion late Wednesday to try to bring the bill to the floor for a vote Friday afternoon. But the bill faces so much opposition that it was unclear whether Frist would be able to garner enough support to end debate and force a vote.
McCain, Gregg and Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire are three of the six Republicans to defect from the Bush administration and forcefully oppose the bill. They argue that the $25 billion in tax breaks for energy industries and roughly $70 billion in other spending are wasteful and fiscally irresponsible.
"It's hard to believe that the administration could endorse a bill that exceeds their level of spending by such a significant number," said Gregg, pointing out that the bill has three times the dollar amount of tax breaks that President Bush initially asked for.
Sununu said the bill surpasses spending limits the Senate adopted six months ago by $800 million in fiscal 2004 and $3.5 billion over the next five years. He also said it unfairly props up some industries, favoring untested technologies like hydrogen-powered cars, which he called a "grandiose pipe dream."
"Why should any legislator, or any bureaucrat, for that matter, be trying to pick the winning or losing energy technology five to 10 years into the future?" asked Sununu, an engineer.
McCain has sarcastically called the legislation "the No Lobbyist Left Behind Act," a play on the education-related No Child Left Behind Act, and the "Hooters and Polluters bill." One provision would give $2 billion in bond incentives to shopping centers in four states that use energy-efficient technology. One of the malls, in Shreveport, La., would contain a Hooters restaurant, part of the chain known for its buxom waitresses.
"Usually when I look at an appropriations bill I see several hundred thousand, maybe in some cases a couple of million" in pork spending, but "these are in the billions," McCain told reporters.
In two days of debate on the floor, the bill's backers, including Budget Committee chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., have repeatedly conceded it may not be perfect, but that it is needed to decrease America's reliance on foreign oil. An imperfect bill is better than none at all, said its chief author, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. And if the bill is killed, Domenici has warned, no comprehensive energy legislation will come about in the near future.
But Gregg and the five other Republicans who have split from their party's leadership argue the bill just goes too far.
Gregg told the Senate Thursday that "one of the most outrageous" provisions would give $2 billion to oil companies in Texas and Louisiana to phase out the use of the gasoline additive MtBE.
Meanwhile, the bill would shield those producers from lawsuits that would force them to pay to clean the chemical from public water supplies. New Hampshire, with 15 percent of its wells contaminated by MtBE, is the only state to sue so far. Its suit would be killed if the bill passed.
Government waste watchdogs speculated late Thursday they were within one or two votes of the 41 needed to sustain a filibuster and prevent the bill from coming to a vote on the Senate floor. But McCain, who said he wasn't sure what the current count was but that "it's close," cautioned that the opposition would need more than a one- or two-vote cushion to be confident it could filibuster the bill.
When the margin is slim, the forces doling out such large prizes usually win out because senators are eager to bring money home to their states, he said. Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who could face a tough reelection next year, has decided to support the bill because his state stands to gain from a $5.9 billion subsidy for ethanol, a corn-based gasoline additive.
"They'll bring all pressure to bear on one or two people," McCain said. The White House, Republican leaders and a number of powerful interest groups have made passage of this bill a high priority.
If GOP leaders manage to overcome a filibuster and get a final vote on the bill, its opponents would most likely not have the votes to sink it.
"It's very apparent what the process here was," said McCain. "'We need somebody's vote; well, what do they need?'"
New Hampshire Sens. Begin Assault on Energy Bill
WASHINGTON - Sen. Judd Gregg condemned the GOP-backed national energy bill on the Senate floor Wednesday, calling it a "gratuitous attack on the Northeast" and an "obscene attack on American taxpayers."
New Hampshire's senior Republican lawmaker helped lead an increasingly rancorous debate over the Bush administration's broad national energy plan as it became clear the bill would face a much tougher fight in the Senate than it did in the House, which passed it with relative ease Tuesday.
As debate on the bill intensified, a bipartisan filibuster that both Gregg and Sen. John E. Sununu have pledged to support seemed likely. Sununu said Wednesday he wasn't sure whether the coalition had the 41 votes necessary to sustain a filibuster and prevent the Senate from voting on the bill. If they didn't, the bill is likely to pass.
Meanwhile, the bill's most ardent supporter and chief author, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., cautioned that killing the bill now would mean killing any meaningful energy legislation in the near future. Traditionally, as the presidential election year approaches, chances for passing controversial legislation dims. And the energy bill, which the Bush administration worked on for nearly three years, is one of the most contentious pieces of legislation to come along in years.
Leafing through the bill's more than 1,200 pages as he paced back and forth on the chamber floor Wednesday, Gregg excoriated supporters for pandering to regional special interests with roughly $25 billion in tax breaks - three times what President Bush had asked for. He called the bill "a socialistic approach to a way to run an economy," a slap at the free market system that Bush and most other Republicans espouse.
Gregg zeroed in on a one section of the bill regarding the use of ethanol, a corn-based additive that makes gasoline burn cleaner. The bill would mandate that the percentage of ethanol used in domestic gasoline be increased by two and half times over the next 10 years. That provision, which froze the bill in negotiations for over a month and threatened to sink it, is seen largely as a concession to senators from agricultural states, including Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
But Gregg argued that experiments with synthetic fuels after the energy crisis of the late 1970s showed that tax breaks and other incentives are worthwhile only if market forces - not political ones - demand them.
"Unless the market makes the product viable, it usually never works," Gregg said.
In an interview, Sununu said the breadth end depth of the tax cuts threatened the fiscal solvency of the government.
"There's no reason to put forward a tax package that's above what the President requested," he said. "The tax subsidies in the bill are huge and are mostly directed toward industries that are relatively strong and profitableá. Providing $25 billion in tax subsidies distorts the competitive marketplace, distorts the investment in the energy industry and is bad for the economy."
Gregg also used his floor time to question provisions of the bill that would require the federal government to pay for environmental impact studies for geothermal? energy companies operating on federal land.
"That's like saying to a drug company that the federal government must pay for research to produce your drug, even though the company will get the profits," he said.
Both Gregg and Sununu criticized another provision of the bill that would protect the makers of the gasoline additive MtBE from a contamination lawsuit filed by New Hampshire in September. The state contends that the product, which the federal government forced several northeastern states to add to fuel to meet clean air standards, is now present in 15 percent its wells.
The bill would protect the makers of the chemical, which the state says could cause cancer, from lawsuits and allow them to continue to produce it until 2015.
"I think this type of case should be decided in the courts, and if it's frivolous to sue the manufacturer of a product simply for having produced a product, then I trust that the courts will give a good judgment," Sununu said.
Domenici said on the Senate floor that the MtBE provision was a compromise that had to be made in order to persuade House negotiators to accept the ethanol provisions, which were needed to win over powerful senators. He warned the growing coalition trying to filibuster the bill that it would be foolish to sink such far-reaching legislation over one small provision on MtBE.
"We did what was politically feasible," Domenici said. "If we do this, the country will be much safer, much better off, for years to come...
"You don't kill this bill in pieces; you adopt it all or none," he added. Domenici repeatedly tried to defuse the argument by some of the bill's opponents that the bill was regionally biased.
But Gregg insisted the Northeast is unfairly hamstrung by the legislation.
"You don't pass a law which says the legitimate activity of a state or a group of states in trying to defend the quality of their environment will be wiped off the books," he said. "It should certainly not be being done by a Republican-dominated Congress, which theoretically still believes there are states out there that have some rights."
NH Lawmakers United Against GOP Energy Bill, MTBE Allowance
WASHINGTON - U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg will vote against a broad national energy bill that would squash a state lawsuit to hold oil companies accountable for their use of a chemical that has poisoned New Hampshire wells, he announced Tuesday.
Gregg, New Hampshire's most powerful Republican lawmaker, yesterday became the fourth and last of the state's Republican Congress members to break with their party and oppose the bill. He has joined a growing regional rebellion within the GOP that pits party stalwarts, including Sen. John Sununu, R-NH, against the Bush administration.
In announcing his opposition to it, Gregg called the energy bill "a grab bag of special interests."
Of particular concern is a section of the bill that would protect producers of MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), a chemical added to gasoline to make it burn more cleanly, from lawsuits. On Sept. 30, New Hampshire filed suit in Merrimack County Superior Court to force 22 oil companies that use the chemical, which the state claims to be a carcinogen, to pay to remove it from the public water supply.
State officials say MTBE has been detected in at least 15 percent of New Hampshire's ground water wells. The source of the contamination is a matter of dispute between the oil industry and the state. While the state is suing on the ground that MTBE is a defective product, industry groups contend the contamination was the result of leaky underground storage tanks for which they're not responsible.
"The use of MTBE was certified and approved 23 years ago by the federal government," said John Kneiss, a technology and policy expert with the Oxygenated Fuels Association, which represents oil companies. He added that it had successfully reduced auto emissions and that it was not the industry's fault New Hampshire's holding facilities leaked.
"It did what it was designed to do," he said of the chemical.
Sixty percent of New Hampshire residents use well water. And preliminary results from a U.S. Geological Survey report to be released next month show that as many as 41 percent of public wells in Rockingham County are contaminated.
The MTBE manufacturers "are saying that they should not be held responsible for this product that they have put in our fuel, and we're saying that under standard principles of defective product liabilityáthey should meet us in court and áshould be responsible for the cleanup costs," said Maureen Smith, the senior assistant attorney general who is handling the lawsuit.
To date, New Hampshire is the only state that has sued over MTBE, but the energy bill would protect the oil industry from liability for contamination on any lawsuit filed after Sept. 5 - effectively killing the Granite State's claim and any that might have come later. It would also allow MTBE to be produced until 2015.
"We want that product off the market," Gregg said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. "What this bill does, instead of taking it off the market, it basically wipes out the lawsuit brought by the state of New Hampshire. It's an ex-post facto law."
"I don't see any justification for the energy bill blocking this lawsuit," said Congressman Jeb Bradley, R-NH, who worked on MTBE issues for years in the state legislature.
Gregg, the only member of the New Hampshire delegation to vote for the bill when it first came before the Senate in July, said it had been changed dramatically during House-Senate negotiations since then.
"I'll not only vote against this bill, I'll vote against attempts to shut down debate on the bill," Gregg said, indicating that he would support an attempt by some Democrats to filibuster the bill and block a Senate vote on it later this week. A spokeswoman for Sununu said he would join the filibuster.
But Gregg said he thought the bill was likely to pass the Senate because negotiators "bought off" many special interests with lucrative subsidies. As a result, senators from states that stand to benefit from subsidies to such industries as agriculture or oil, regardless of party, will vote for the bill, he said.
In the House, Congressmen Charles Bass, R-NH, joined Bradley in voting against the bill Tuesday for similar reasons. The bill passed, 246-180 as 46 Democrats joined 200 Republicans to support it. Along with Bradley and Bass, XX Republicans opposed the measure.
"Energy is not partisan," Bass said. "This is not liberals versus conservatives, or Democrats versus Republicans. These are issues that relate to districts."
Gregg said he had not discussed the issue with President Bush but had been in contact with Bush's staff. He also said he wasn't concerned his opposition would harm his relationship with the president.
"You take issues issue by issue," he said. "You don't personalize them, and you move on."
New Hampshire environmentalists put it more starkly.
"The message is clear that there is a huge divide between Bush politics and GOP politics, and there is nothing that is more important than public health and environment," said Jan Pendlebury of the New Hampshire office of the National Environmental Trust, which opposed the bill.
Gregg said the country needs an energy bill, but not one that's based on special-interest politics.
"It's a very poorly structured bill from an energy policy standpoint, it's a poor bill from an environmental standpoint and it's a terrible bill from the standpoint of basically taking care of a few favored interests who happen to have some power down here in the Congress and who were serving on the conference committee," he said.
"Other than that," he quipped, "I think it's a great bill."
Sununu and Gregg to Jump in Marathon Debate Over Blocked Judges
WASHINGTON - Both of New Hampshire's Republican senators will take part in a rare, three-day talkathon aimed at pressuring Democrats to stop blocking President Bush's judicial nominees.
Like their 49 Republican colleagues, Sens. Gregg and Sununu will take part in at least 30 consecutive hours of debate intended to punish Democrats for their dramatic, and so far successful, tactics to prevent the Senate from voting on four nominations.
Even though the Republicans have a majority in the Senate, they need 60 votes to end debate and bring an issue to a vote. The minority Democrats have capitalized on this technicality to use filibusters to prevent confirmation votes on a handful of Bush's most controversial nominees.
While Republicans charge Democrats with obstructing the judicial system, Democrats counter that they have approved the vast majority -- 168 -- of the President's nominees and have held up only the four they view as too conservative for key judgeships.
Gregg and Sununu will each take the floor early Thursday afternoon in the marathon debate scheduled to begin Wednesday evening. Republicans say they hope to be able to change the rules of the Senate to reduce the number of votes needed to end debate. Democrats will have to keep at least one senator on the floor at all times to prevent the GOP from taking an immediate voice vote and confirming the nominees.
Gregg said the Democratic tactics amount to an end-run around the Constitution.
"As soon as they give us a vote, the issue will be resolved," Gregg said Tuesday. "What they're trying to do is change the constitutional structureá. The Constitution has been traditionally viewed as requiring 51 votes to approve a judge. They're now, for the first time in history, suggesting that you need 60 votes to approve a judge, which is a significant change in the balance of power between the executive and legislative branch and changes the function of the Senate."
But blocking judicial nominees is nothing new. Republicans did it repeatedly when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, occupied the White House, often by keeping his nominations locked up in committees so the full Senate could not vote on them.
Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has tried to dispel the notion that filibusters have never been used before, citing four instances over the last 40 years when Republicans used filibusters to block nominees.
"So it is troubling to us that this assertion is made over and over that filibusters are unprecedented when clearly the record shows that there have been many filibusters," Daschle told reporters Tuesday. Sununu said the verbal slugfest will publicize how Democrats have hijacked parliamentary procedure to inhibit the Senate's ability to function.
"I think that kind of obstruction, whether it's on judicial appointments or on legislation, is something that frustrates every American," Sununu said Tuesday. "I don't think it's something that's supported, and this debate is simply going to highlight that fact."
Democrats contend they're well within their rights to use the technicality to their advantage. They also said they are fighting for respect. They argue that the Republican majority has made full use of its power to set the Senate's agenda, preventing the chamber from debating a number of key issues.
To fight this, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., seized the floor Monday afternoon during debate on an appropriations bill and refused to yield for nine hours, during which he blasted Republicans for their treatment of Democrats.
J. Mark Wrighton, a University of New Hampshire political scientist and an expert on Congress, said the Democrats would do the same as the Republicans if put in the same position.
"At some point, it's going to detract from the ability to staff the judicial branch," Wrighton said. "The majority, no matter who it is, has to find a way to get judges confirmed, and unfortunately there's nothing apolitical about this process."
The partisan fight comes as Congress works to wrap up a number of significant issues, including a Medicare prescription drug plan and energy bill, before recessing for the holidays.
Democrats have said that the Republicans' three-day, two-night talkathon will delay votes on critical bills.
But, Gregg said, getting the judges appointed is Senate business. He said there's no comparison between the GOP's 30 hours of talk and Reid's nine-hour filibuster.
"What we're doing is the opposite of a filibuster," he said. "What we're saying is let's go back to the old way, let's have a vote. And they're saying, 'No.'"
Nashua Native Helps Shadowy Agency Hunt Government Cheats
WASHINGTON - - Don't ask Special Agent Andrew Hodges where he's been. Don't ask him where he's going. Odds are, he can't tell you. Try to swindle the federal government, though, and you'll likely be hearing from him.
Hodges, 30, a Nashua native, is a fraud sleuth in the Air Force's shadowy and sometimes hated Office of Special Investigations (OSI). It's the agency charged with hunting spies and tracking terrorists as well as rooting out criminals from inside the Air Force itself.
It's also his job to ensure that the government gets what it pays for in the multibillion-dollar defense contracting industry. By Hodges' own estimation, if you've never heard of him, he's doing just fine.
"You say OSI and people think Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man," Hodges said in a recent interview at OSI headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. He was referring to the 1970s television series starring Lee Majors as a bionic agent for the fictional Office of Strategic Investigations.
"That's good in a lot of ways," he added, cracking a smile. "We'd prefer to kind of stay in the shadows."
Those who break the law would probably prefer it, too. Many soldiers maintain a stiff distance from Hodges and his fellow agents, who are in the prickly position of having to investigate their own.
"People have this image of OSI that we're kind of the bad guys, the guys that kick down your door and take you away in handcuffs if you're doing drugs," he said. "You can kill a party real quick when you walk in."
The image is not entirely false.
He recalled with distinct satisfaction watching one belligerent and particularly "pompous" senior airman and small-time Ecstasy dealer get "slam-dunked."
Hodges' detective work landed the fellow three years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. ("To see the expression on his face when they told him his sentence was kind of fun," Hodges said.)
But after four years with the agency, Hodges has graduated from corralling drug dealers, rapists and thieves inside the Air Force to stalking those who would try to scam it from the outside.
"Basically it's people that cheat the government," he said. The problem dates at least to the Civil War, when the Union Army was flimflammed into buying boxes of ammunition that were full of sawdust.
And as military equipment gets more complex, Hodges said the stakes get proportionately higher. If, for example, contractors try to shave expenses by putting a cheap, flimsy grade of metal in a helicopter, not only are they stealing from the government, the results could be catastrophic.
There are "guys out there putting their lives on the line, putting their trust in the equipment that it will work as promised," said Hodges, who has a master's degree in economic crime from the University of Alabama.
Federal prosecutors sued TRW, a subsidiary of aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman, for billing the government for millions of dollars of work done on non-government space contracts during the 1990s. After almost ten years in court, Northrop agreed in June to pay a $111 million settlement. Hodges said such complex cases routinely drag on from five to 15 years.
Despite having to slog through mountains of documents and to coordinate complex investigations with dozens of other federal agencies, Hodges said the trick to nabbing government grifters really is "old-fashioned detective work." And that runs in his blood: Hodges grandfather was one of the first OSI agents when the Air Force was created in 1948; his father, Robert, was a long-time detective and captain with the Nashua Police Department.
Hodges declined requests to interview his family and friends, or even to name them. His parents - his father is retired - now live in Wolfeboro. His brother, an Army Reservist based out of Londonderry, is in Iraq.
As fraud operations program manager, Hodges now spends more time facilitating investigations than he does actually sleuthing. It is, he begrudgingly acknowledged, a cushy desk job with "bankers' hours."
Still, like all soldiers, he must to be ready to deploy immediately to any number of "ugly" places when the call comes. It came four months ago, when Hodges was summoned to lead a security and counterintelligence detail out of the American Embassy in Pakistan. In the interview, he spoke in carefully guarded tones and uses almost incomprehensible jargon to describe his duty there: "threat collection," "vulnerability assessment," and so on.
But he softened at the memory of one specific encounter, with a fellow Granite Stater no less, on a steamy runway in Islamabad, Pakistan, in August. It was U.S. Sen. John Sununu, who was on a whirlwind tour of Central Asia and the Middle East with other senators.
The weary group emerged from the plane and Hodges' detail "herded" them to a heavily defended motorcade.
Recognizing Sununu, Hodges jumped in to ride shotgun in his van.
"I mentioned I was from New Hampshire and he seemed kind of shocked to bump into somebody -- a constituent, so to speak," Hodges laughed, "much less one holding an M-4" assault rifle.
Sununu to Support Internet Tax Ban; Could Cost NH Millions
WASHINGTON - Sen. John Sununu announced his support Wednesday for an Internet tax ban that could cost New Hampshire millions of dollars. Two of the state's three other representatives in Congress, Sen. Judd Gregg and Rep. Jeb Bradley, both Republicans, also support the ban.
"The Internet is a technological tool used by millions of Americans to transact business," Sununu said in a statement. "Access to it deserves to remain free from tax burdens that will hinder our country's potential for economic growth."
Since 1998, the Granite State has been exempt from a temporary ban that barred other states from taxing Internet connections and from taxing Internet purchases differently from the way they tax other purchases. It also prevented more than one state from taxing the same sale.
New Hampshire was allowed to continue to collect taxes on Internet access despite the ban because its 7 percent tax on all two-way communication within the state, including telephone calls, began in 1990, well before the 1998 moratorium. But Sununu said states that jumped to tax the Internet before Congress acted "will have to resolve their issue."
But the ban expired Saturday. And a bill sponsored by Sen. George Allen, R-Va., to extend it indefinitely would eliminate exemptions for New Hampshire and nine other states in 2006.
The bill's supporters argue that taxing Internet connections hurts free expression. They also contend it would unfairly affect low-income people less able to pay the tax.
States are the primary opponents of the ban. Officials from the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration could not be reached for comment late Wednesday. Some estimates show the ban could cost the state $5 million to $15 million a year.
New Hampshire Republican Congressman Charles Bass fought a similar House bill to ban Internet taxation in September, though he has said he opposes taxing the Internet. Bass has said that the ban would interfere with states' rights to levy taxes and that it would be unfair for the federal government to impose a law that would cost states so much. The bill passed the House by a voice vote.
"What this bill does is eliminate the ability of the state of New Hampshire and áother states to collect revenue on what is justifiably a state-centered tax," Bass said on the House floor.
The House version of the bill would eliminate New Hampshire's exemption immediately. A spokesman said Bradley did not oppose the bill based on assurances he'd received that the exemption would be extended for three years in the Senate version.
If the Senate passes its version of the ban, which Gregg is c-sponsoring, House and Senate negotiators would hammer out a final version of the bill.
The core argument, Sununu said at a press conference, is whether access to the Internet is fair game for taxation.
"If you're standing up to protect the right of these states to continue to levy these taxes, then you are effectively saying, 'I believe the Internet should be taxed,' " Sununu said.
Charlie Arlinghaus, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Concord, said taxing the Internet goes against the core reason that taxes exist: to pay for services.
"There is not a building that exists [on the Internet] that needs fire protection, there are no parking issues or traffic issues," Arlinghaus said. "The only excuse for taxing the Internet is because you think government needs more money, and I think, by and large, the American public has been encouraging policies that do not take more money from their pockets."
Some NH Towns and Cities a No-Show on Fed Crimes
WASHINGTON - New Hampshire's violent crime rate dropped last year, but remains significantly higher than it was in the late 1990s, according to crime statistics released last week by the FBI.
The violent crime rate declined 5.3 percent in 2002, which translated to 88 fewer murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults than in 2001.
But New Hampshire law enforcement agencies reported 897 more violent crimes last year than in 1999, the statistics show. Taking the state's growing population into account, that still meant a 67 percent increase in violent crime rate in just three years.
However, with several of New Hampshire's biggest cities - including Concord, Nashua and Salem--and many smaller towns not reporting, those statistics represent only 76 percent of the state's population, the data show. The result is a picture of crime in the Granite State that some experts say might not be entirely accurate.
"You've got a small percentage change and a lot of missing data," said Jim Lynch, chairman of the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University here. A quarter of the population "is a lot not to cover," he said.
Lynch, who has worked with the data for years, said not counting several large cities, which tend to have higher crime rates, can make statewide rates appear lower than they actually are.
It's a trend he said has been showing up on a national scale, too. The national reporting rate has dropped from about 95 percent of the total population in the mid-90s to 85 percent now, he said.
The FBI issues what is known as Crime in the United States every fall based on crime statistics voluntarily reported by over 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Usually, New Hampshire and other states send data to the FBI once a month.
Experts often have criticized the reports because they're voluntary, because they reflect only reported crime and because they summarize complex crime data into nine simple categories. And with states strapped for cash in recent years, reporting operations have often received short shrift, leading to spottier data, Lynch said.
Even the FBI declines to compare crime rates among states.
"They don't have much control over the system," said Lynch, noting that Florida has been known to drop out every few years. "It's far-flung and it's voluntary."
New Hampshire's violent crime rate dropped from 170 per 100,000 people in 2001 to 161 in 2002. In raw numbers, New Hampshire reported 2,144 violent crimes in 2001 and 2,056 the following year, compared to 1,159 in 1999, when the rate per 100,000 people was 96.5.
New Hampshire's murder rate, however, was 40 percent lower last year than it was in 1999 - from 1.5 per 100,000 to 0.9. Though the murder rate was also down, by 33 percent, in 2002, that drop was caused by an increase in population. There actually were the same number of murders -- seven-- in the past two years and 18 in 1999. Robbery and rape rates were also down slightly last year, but up from 1999.
During that three-year period, the state's population grew by about 74,000 to 1,275,056, a 6 percent increase.
Unlike some places, where Lynch said reporting has gotten worse, New Hampshire's reporting rate actually improved last year. In 2001, the FBI received reports from cities and towns that encompassed just 65.8 percent of the state's population.
Nashua did not report last year because it was in the midst of transferring to a more detailed reporting system, said Karen Lamb of the New Hampshire State Police, who is in charge of coordinating New Hampshire's data for the FBI. She said Salem has not reported since 1994. Salem and Concord officials could not be reached for comment.
And although the FBI does not rank states based on their reporting rate, a number of them did better than New Hampshire. In 2002, California reported at a rate of 100 percent, Utah and Maine at 99 percent.
"New Hampshire has one of the lowest reporting rates in the country," said Mark Thompson, director of administration in the New Hampshire Department of Justice. "However, that is only half the story, because the good news is that we're increasing tremendously."
Thompson attributed the lag in reporting to a shift by many New Hampshire agencies to a more detailed and potentially more accurate reporting system.
"There are holes in the reporting fabric, and you've got to be very careful about what conclusions you draw from these data if you're not certain if they're really representative of the entire state," said Ted Kirkpatrick, director of Justiceworks, a research group at the University of New Hampshire.
Kirkpatrick said data can accurately portray broad trends in crime but cannot be used to compare states to one another.
"The one thing that you can be pretty certain about is that crime relative to other parts of the country is extremely low in New England, particularly in the three northern New England states," he said. But, "You get into this: 'Well we show that we're actually lower than Maine,' " he said. "And I don't think the quality of data allows us to show that with certainty."
Gregg Investigates Academic Freemon on U.S.Campuses
WASHINGTON - U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg is leading a congressional inquiry to investigate whether, as college tuition costs soar across the country, the academic climate on campuses has remained free and open.
The New Hampshire Republican and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has called a series of four hearings before his committee to find out whether intellectual diversity is an "endangered species on America's college campuses."
In an interview, Gregg said: "I'm concerned that we're developing a generation of people that don't understand the basic history of the United States, especially how we developed a constitutional democracy. I'm concerned that on certain campuses there has been a failure of dialogue, that people who disagree with political correctness on the campus are not allowed to make their points, are marginalized. And I'm concerned that we've created an academic atmosphereá where dogma is becoming the rule of the day and indoctrination the manner to promote the dogma."
Gregg, in a written opening statement before the second hearing held Wednesday, said: "Ultimately, this is a quality issue. While college tuitions go up and up, it's fair to ask just what students and parents are getting for their money."
Citing what he called a proliferation of "pet courses" - such as one called "pornography and prostitution in history" at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University - that he said squeeze their way into curricula based on "interest-group politics" rather than academic merit, Gregg expressed concern that more traditional courses on American and European history are being replaced. But he added that it wasn't government's job to legislate what students should learn.
The hearings dovetail with a bill Gregg introduced earlier this year to provide grants to promote American government and civics education in U.S. schools. A committee hearing last month examined the content of the textbooks used in America's primary and secondary schools.
"What are we teaching them about our American traditions if traditional subjects like political and constitutional history are shoved aside to make room for trendy courses designed to appeal to grievance-based politics?" Gregg asked in his opening remarks.
The committee also heard testimony from civil libertarian groups that fear that colleges and universities are infringing on students' First Amendment right to free speech by imposing speech codes.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education ranks Dartmouth College and the University of New Hampshire among the worst offenders in the nation when it comes to vague rules that restrict students' speech, said the group's CEO, Thor Halvorssen, Thursday.
Both universities denied the allegations. "The foundation of Dartmouth College is that we are a marketplace of ideas and we are committed to the free exchange of all views," said Laurel Stavis, a spokesperson for Darthmouth.
Kim Billings, a spokesperson for the University of New Hampshire called the allegation "ludicrous" and said, "Of course we support the First Amendment right to speecháif there's one thing about a university, we all have an opinion about everything and we all listen to each other."
On Wednesday, the foundation's director of legal and public advocacy told the committee these speech codes are all the more disturbing at academic institutions that often claim to foster environments of free speech and open debate.
Professor David Johnson of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York testified that he was persecuted and nearly denied tenure because his areas of expertise - political, diplomatic and constitutional history - were considered too conservative by his institution.
Gregg echoed Johnson's concerns.
"There appears to be an increasing number of incidents in which alternative viewpoints are either silenced or ignored in the classroom - often with hostility or disdain," he said.
