Washington Straight Talk; Patrick Leahy

Patrick J. Leahy, Democratic Senator from Vermont. Tonight on Washington Straight Talk, freshman Senator Patrick Leahy is interviewed by ENPAC correspondent Paul Duke. Senator is one of approximately 100 new members of Congress. Are you disappointed in the performance of the 1975 session? I'm concerned in one way, yes. It has not done the things that many of us had hoped to be doing. Many of us talked about it during our campaigns. It seems to have gone much slower on energy matters, even though this is an area of prime concern in the American people. Economic matters, after the, it's been obvious the policies the last few years have not worked. We've gone to one of the greatest recessions we've ever had, and yet the

Congress has moved far too slowly in addressing those matters. So that extent I've been disappointed. I've been, however, quite pleased with the competence of a number of the key people in the Congress. Do you agree with those critics then who suggest this is turning out to be a disastrous year for the Democrats? No, I don't think so. I think that there have been a number of good proposals. The Democratic-controlled Congress has put forward a number of very good ones that they have passed that have been vetoed. I think that if there is any disastrous been for the country and the fact that we haven't been able to override some of those vetoes. Why is this? Because the Democrats do have overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate. I think that sometimes there are an awful lot of us who can stand the doorstep and give a speech full of high-sounding phrases and feel very good about it and go back in afterward and say we've done to save the country. And not realize that we've got to adopt the pay, for example, for some of the Southern Conservatives of doing your homework very, very carefully, counting your votes very, very carefully.

Things like the strip mining bill never, that veto should have been overridden in the House. It should have been overridden by solid majorities and it wasn't the jobs bill. Another one that should have. And the homework just had not been done in those cases. Are you worried about stalemate government with the president and the Democratic Congress unable to reconcile their differences? I think it's a very real possibility. And I think that the fact that the president has exercised the veto power in some instances, I think, in an irresponsible fashion. I think that it indeed will bring about stalemate because what's going to happen is the Congress is going to start passing some bills without the care that they should use, figuring that they're going to be vetoed anyway. And the president's automatically going to veto them. And everybody can set up their own power plays and you have five hundred and thirty-five people up in the hill and the one person and the other independence of any avenue doing that. And having a great time of it and the only people

that suffer from the 220 million Americans, Republicans and Democrats. You mentioned the irresponsibility of the president. What about the irresponsibility of the Democrats in Congress? And let me give you one example. They pushed through recently a bill designed to provide more public service jobs. And the only thing is that when you talk to many of the Democrats, they admitted that the bill was inflated, including pork barrel projects and some other measures that were not approved that much by the Democrats themselves. Now, don't the Democrats have to scale down some of their grand designs because we do have a huge budget deficit? Yes, they do need to. In fact, there was one public's works bill that I thought in concept was very good, but I voted against it because, according to the Budget Committee, it would have increased the deficit by close to nine billion dollars. It was to inflate it. And it reaches a point where you have to go against

it. And I did. But in the bill that the president vetoed, again, that there was too much haste shown in some parts of that. But it was still better than no bill at all. And that's what we ended up with. And I think there would have been much better if the president allowed it to go through and hold back some of the money involved in it. I think the Congress would have gone along with them on that. But again, it happens this thing where you have almost a four-hour-day thing that these kind of bills are going to be vetoed by the president. And you tend to get stopped in the Congress because of that. And that's bad. I think it could be a much closer work relationship. For example, one of the things this country needs and wants very much is a national health care plan. But the president announced at the beginning of the year that he would veto any national health care plan no matter what it was. This makes it very, very difficult to put together responsible legislation in an area that the American people want, the American people need.

You mentioned just a few minutes ago the energy bill. There's no real indication that the Democrats are going to come up with any kind of meaningful program to conserve energy. Why can't the Democrats do anything in this area? Well, one of the problems, of course, has been the House where part of this has to come through on tax measures. And the Ways and Means Committee has been far too slow. And I agree both with Senator Mansfield and others from the House who have said that. But we have given the president certain things. We've given him the ability to make mandatory allocations to the states and to keep price controls and oil. He has that. I personally feel this is the best way to go. It's far better than adding on a tax, additional tax onto the price of gasoline. Gasoline price is too high now. It's one of the major causes of our recession. And it would bankrupt a state like Vermont, for example, where I'm from. The New England area would be badly hit by the plans of the president. It would be far better to have this mandatory allocation and in mandatory prices. That law has been

passed. The president has chosen not to use it. When he didn't, I think that the Congress should have moved with much tighter energy legislation. They didn't. There's a major disappointment to me. And I, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, share the blame in both parties do. There's no, there's no justification for that at all. One of the lay he, as you may or may not know, when the Democrats assembled for their new session in January, there was a mood of euphoria as if we were perhaps progressing toward a new era in this country where the aggressive spirit of the government would come from Congress and not the White House. And now this seems to have, all of this mood has now turned very sour for the Democrats. The initiative has passed to President Ford. And all of the brave talk about a raft of new legislation, redressing all the inequities, seems to have gone down the drain. What went wrong for the Democrats?

I don't know. And again, I mentioned before, there have been good pieces of legislation gone through the consumer agency bill that went through the Senate. I think is excellent. But that is not going through the House. No, it has not. And the strip mining bill, though, went through overwhelmingly in both parties and got vetoed. It was a good piece of legislation. We did move very rapidly on a tax cut with some good aspects of the tax bill on balance, again, better than the no bill. Part of it, of course, is you're dealing with individuals. You're dealing with 535 individuals. There has not been enough, especially with so many new people, there's not been enough realization of how difficult it is to work as a cohesive body. And there has not been enough effort in the House and the Senate to bring some of these cohesive groups together. So you have small pockets that have the discipline over the years that are able to work. And I think that this is bad, but I think it's something that will

straighten out, hopefully by the end of this year. And I think it will. We're already beginning to see signs of it. I think it will. If not, then the Congress is going to have to admit that the President took the initiative away from them, even though it was a negative initiative in many cases, simply vetoing legislation, but still took it away from the Congress. But isn't this already a fact now, Senator Leahy, just a couple of days ago, the House Speaker, Carl Albert, conceded that the Democrats stand no chance of getting through many of their major bills because of the President's veto power that they must now look to electing a Democratic President in 1976. So well, if it means by saying that, Paul, if it means simply just throwing up our hands and saying we can't do anything, and that's irresponsible, I think that we should make every single effort to put together as good pieces of legislation in these major areas. I mentioned National Health Care. It's an obvious one. Put this legislation together and pass

it, even if it is vetoed, make the effort and pass it and let the American people see it and make sure the American people know what's been passed by the Congress. Because I think that the, if indeed, the Congress was right in the legislation they passed, right that this is what the American people want and need, then they reflect that the polls next year. But I don't think that we should simply just play dead because the President will continue to veto these pieces of legislation. It's probably all the more important for us to put together the best legislation possible. And hope that, actually, for the sake of the country, aside from the political aspects, I hope for the sake of the country that maybe there are some areas where we can get together with the President. Some of the Democrats in the House, some of the freshmen members of the House are now saying that are now revolting against the leadership of Speaker Albert, contending he is a weak and ineffective leader. And you hear it said in the Senate sometime that Mike

Mansfield, the Democratic leader there, is not aggressive enough that he's too nice a guide to be a leader. What's your opinion of his leadership? Well, I have a very high opinion of Senator Mansfield. You reject that criticism? I do indeed. And I think you have a different situation. For one, the House, you got 435 people. There were two year terms with nowhere near an individual basis. I would know where near the power or influence of individual senators. And I could safely say it's being number 99 out of number 99. I don't put myself in that category. But the senators are far more individualistic. And I think that if you try to do a Lyndon Johnson kind of majority leadership today, the very strong lockstep sort, with so many of the newer, younger senators, it wouldn't work at all. And I think that it, a number of the reforms that Senator Mansfield has tried to get through, are going through. There is more openness in the committees. One of the things is that younger members instead

of waiting five, six years to get any kind of a significant committee assignments are now getting them almost immediately. So there are assets being taken. There have been proposals made. And I think one of the most important ones, the proposal made in the Democratic caucus, is to take away from some of the major committees. The jurisdiction over energy matters and put into one committee and also do some other significant revamping of jurisdiction in some of the committees. If this can be done, and if Senator Mansfield can carry that off, then I don't think it would be any question of leadership ability. Do you have any criticisms of the Senate, the way it's run? Oh, yes, I do. The amount of wasted time we have. I would much prefer seeing a system where we might have three or four weeks of just committee hearings. Put the attendance in the congressional record. That's an encouragement for us to do our civic duty. Put the attendance in the synopsis of what goes on in the committee meetings. And then go in for a week or so

of solid legislative session from nine to nine to 10 o'clock at night and just go through the legislation that we've had there. Stop wasting time with the dilatory matters and call dilatory matters, dilatory matters when indeed they occur. Is there happening right now in the Wyman, Durkin, a race? Those are things should be done. Re-vamp the jurisdiction in some of the committees. We have dozens of subcommittees taking up space, staff, expense, didn't ever sit, didn't ever do anything. Then let's acknowledge it and move them out. It should have a much leaner Senate, I feel. The, I accept the fact that the way we run our offices, antiquated, antiquated methods is so much of it could use a good business expert, efficiency expert, just in the running of the offices. If we did that, we could cut down the cost up there. These things, these things, new disappoint me in this. Would you abolish the seniority system? I think I would change the seniority system

considerably. I would say, for example, if a person is the chairman of a major committee could not also be the chairman of the major subcommittees under that committee, have to go to the bottom of the line or the back of the line for assignments. The chairman of a major committee should not be a chairman of major subcommittees and other committees, because they've got enough to do just to chair that one major committee instead of having the power primarily held. The legislative committee primarily held in a half a dozen men, spread it around. What's the Senate going to do in the furious fight now, raging over the vacant Senate seat involving your next door neighbor, New Hampshire? Well, if they keep going the way they've gone in the last two weeks, they're not going to do anything. And I think that's wrong. Is it likely then that the seat is going to remain vacant for some time? Yes, indeed. If that is followed, that whole thing could be settled in two days' time. Everybody knows that they're not going to vote to send it back without at least making

an attempt to decide it in the Senate. They could go on in two days' time and go through a thirty-five final contested balance. If a determination then cannot be made, fine, send it back to New Hampshire. But at least make that attempt first. I think that the Senate certainly can lose respect of the people and should. They spend weeks and weeks fooling around with that when we have major energy matters, tax matters, housing matters, economic matters, before us it should be attended to. Many of the newer members of Congress campaigned as a new breed of liberal, even talking about less big government and balancing the budget and austere programs and that kind of thing. And one of your colleagues, Senator Gary Hart from Colorado, said, we're not a bunch of little Hubert Humphries. Do you subscribe to that view? Do you think the time has come

to find new solutions to these problems and not rely upon the federal government so much? I think very definitely. And I have a project that we're starting in our office to try to suggest how responsive, selective bureaucracy has been. And we're finding things that it appears that when a particular program, department, whatever, doesn't work, we keep it in place and just add on another one and another one and another one. Using old methods it just didn't work in the past and we continue with them. And I agree we've got to change that. I think that we cannot accept, for example, the defense budget is being a sacred cow, even though the Congress by and large has. And I said on the Armed Services Committee. And while I go along with some of the aspects of the defense budget, we are after all the preeminent military power in the world. I see us adding on missile systems that simply enlarge the arms race that are inordinately costly. And it's money that should be better spent

on other matters in the country or not spent at all because it does add to our deficit. It does come out of our tax dollars. And I think that a number of these agencies would be good if we sat them off with a zero funding some year and make them justify their programs. I knew we'd find a lot of programs that would drop by the waste half that was done. Well the defense department is a convenient target for liberals and has been now for some years. I mentioned the defense department simply because I am on the Armed Services Committee and I think I probably spend as many hours as any member of the Senate to issue that. I grant you that. But what about the social welfare program? Shouldn't they be tightened up? Of course they should. Of course they should. We can find time and time again programs that did not work and yet we continue to fund them. They've had their own built-in lobby so we continue to fund them and add on nuance. And this should be no sacred cow there and I, whether persons of liberal or conservative, they've got to accept that fact.

As you said on the Senate Armed Services Committee, do you feel that the military keeps too many things secret from the American people? Absolutely. And I think that this is not only the military. I think we find this in so many parts of the government whether it's a justice department, we mentioned the military or others. I remember one instance where we had a closed door briefing by the director of the CIA. Flashed a picture of a new weapon system from the Soviet Union onto the screen and it was marked top secret sensitive which is the highest classification you can really get. And I looked at it and I said, I said, there's a new boy here, I kind of hate to interrupt but I saw that same picture in time magazine a few months before and they acknowledged yes that was true and it was the same picture. They were a little bit embarrassed by that but the funny thing about a poll, if somebody went out with that slide and distributed, they'd be guilty of a serious crime in this country but they went out with the time magazine and gave the same picture. Out of course there'd

be no crime involved. But we do as we have instances where we're talking about things involved in the Soviets that all the Soviets know and we keep in secret so the American people don't know them. And I think it's just too, too convenient when somebody doesn't want to talk about a thing, when somebody doesn't want to expose it to public scrutiny and probably public rejection. They marked secret. Being a crime, you were a prosecuting attorney in Vermont. Is the crime problem in this country beyond solution? Do you have any thoughts about it? No, I don't think the crime problem is beyond solution at all. I think that we sometimes get carried away with statistics. We use our police in the wrong places, in the wrong ways. We spend time going after victimless crimes that we really shouldn't be going after. We seem unable or unwilling from a federal level to go after organized crime, go after the mafia, go after major drug dealing. And we'll always have politicians who will

say, here's a way to solve crime just simply increase the penalties without showing any way of actually catching the people. I think the president's latest proposal, there are a number of good things in this crime proposal, diversionary programs for youthful offenders. I did that myself in my own office, giving the victims a crimes. I find some way to reimburse victims of crimes. We've called one case where police chief was killed. His sale was wounded. We spent a quarter of a million dollars taking care of the sale in the hospital. They had to take up a collection to pay the funeral bills for the police chief. Those are things that should be done. But the same time to say that we're going to wipe our crimes simply by increasing the penalty, simply by putting mandatory minimum sentences, this is ridiculous. It's demagoguery at the worst. And it really doesn't come with that much grace when it comes from the same president who pardon Richard Nixon.

When we think of crime, we think of the man who mugs on the street or the man who rapes or the man who wields a gun. But what about white collar crime? Did you have much involvement with that in Vermont? Yes. I had established the first consumer fraud or economic crime unit in the prosecutor's office in Vermont. I was also a national code chairman of the National District Attorney's Association Economic Crime Project. And we found tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars. The crime committed, the white collar crime, economic crime, major corporations involved in fleecing the public, but nobody says anything about them or are they caught? Isn't this an area where you can do something about in Congress? Yes, we can. And in one small step in a related area, of course, is a consumer agency. The bill that's gone through the Senate is now in the House. And I don't know how

will fare with the president when it gets there. But I think that we should write in and continue to write in extremely tough consumer protection laws from a criminal element. Because it does no good to just give a civil fine against a company. Because they'd fraud the public. They just added on. They tacked on the next goods that they sell. But we started sending a few corporate managers to jail for what they did, for the data that they've hidden on an automobile that's faulty or whatever. Then, then you finally get a handle on it. But that's five more serious crime than the kid who steals a car or breaks into a warehouse and steals a couple of cases of beer. And yet, we talk about the latter kind of crime. What do you see as the most important issue confronting the country today? I think it is the economy. But related to that, the confidence or lack of confidence, the American people in their government to do anything about the economy. Because no

matter what we do in public priming and public works jobs and tax cuts and so on, if the average American person is not confident that we can get it under control, it doesn't work at all. And that lack of confidence in government is, as far as I'm concerned, our greatest concern. It's my personal greatest concern. You're the second youngest man now serving in the Senate. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being so young, 34 years of age? Well, I've found really no disadvantages, because except for the question of seniority, you are treated very much as an equal in the Senate. I've found that committee chairman and so forth. The advantages are very obvious that if Vermont stays true to nature and returning incumbents, I should be there a number of years. And I will...

Are you going to make this a lifetime career? Well, the voters will decide. No, but your predecessor, Senator Bacon, was there, I believe, until he was 85 years old. Senator Bacon was elected the year I was born. I don't intend to stay that long by any means, but I would like to have several terms in the Senate very much. Because Vermont, Vermont Senator has a tremendous advantage coming from a very small state, can spend far more time on purely legislative matters. And that's the advantage of being there as a young person from a small state. The advantage is very enormous. Do you accept the old rule that freshmen are seeing and not heard in Congress? Not at all. I've given several speeches on the Senate floor. I was one of the most active people involved in the debate on the military budget and the attempts to make cuts in the military budget. When the Armed Services Committee voted for the first time to stop further authorizations for military to South Vietnam, it was by one vote. That committee was enlarged

by one person who put me on. I voted against it. I think it would be a waste of my time and it would not be fair to my constituents if I took that kind of a silent way. I'm not going to. You've seen it happen time and again in this town. A young man like yourself comes to Washington to Congress, brimming with idealism, talking about all the great things he's going to do. And then he is corrupted and seduced by all the power and glory of being here. Do you have the fear that that will happen to you? Oh, I have a very great fear that that could happen and I try to combat it. I probably go back to my state more than just about anybody. I have at least five working days a month in my state. It's really even more than that that I'm back there. I call probably a couple of dozen people a day back in Vermont. Someone picked it random from letters that have come in just to get their reaction. I read every piece of mail that goes out of our office. I'm on talk shows a dozen times or more a month in Vermont. We do it by telephone and

action to get the feel of the people there. And I go into other parts of the country every month just to talk with people, see what they're, see what their concerns are. And I find very much that the concerns of the people out there are many times off a lot different than the concerns that we hear expressed here in Washington or that the press continuously tells us either concerns of the people here in Washington. Let me ask you one final crunch question. Would you vote for a bill in which you strongly believe even if you felt it meant you're certain to feet? I think I would. I hope I would, Paul. I would, I would hope I would. I took a number of positions in my own campaign that I posed, told us we're very, very impopular. I knew it was going to be a close election. I felt they could have defeated me. I took them just the same. Thank you, Senator Lee. Washington Strait Talk. From Washington, N. Pactis brought you Democratic Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont with N. Pact Correspondent Paul Duke.

Next week on Washington Strait Talk, presidential press secretary Ron Nesson will be interviewed by N. Pact Correspondent Paul Duke. Production funding provided by Public Television Stations, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This has been a production of N. Pact, a division of GWETA.