CONGRESS - Another Showdown, Bud Shuster Style

By Kirk Victor, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Saturday, April 03, 1999

	  
   Quick, name the veteran House Republican committee 
chairman who is the most willing to make his party's leaders 
sweat. Here's a hint: He's the guy who was not afraid to threaten 
to torpedo the painstakingly crafted budget resolution last week, 
on the eve of the Easter recess. Another hint? He's so tenacious 
and so confident about his ability to prevail in any showdown 
involving his panel's turf that he is not about to let up in 
pressing his agenda, despite the calls of new Speaker J. Dennis 
Hastert, R-Ill., for ''team play.'' 
	     Stumped? You shouldn't be. After all, his latest 
maneuvers are a repeat performance of his earlier face-offs with 
the leadership. The answer is Bud Shuster of Pennsylvania, the 
irrepressible chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure 
Committee. 
	     First elected in 1972, the 67-year-old lawmaker is 
legendary for his pugnacious way of protecting funding for 
transportation programs. Shuster has long fought for the 
principle that the federal transportation trust funds--billions 
of dollars accumulated from special gasoline, airplane, and cargo 
taxes--must be devoted to rebuilding roads, relieving airport 
congestion, and addressing transit needs, not diverted to general 
budget needs. 
	     His latest salvos came as lawmakers were about to escape 
for the Easter break, just as House Republicans were feeling good 
about Hastert's early performance and about their party's ability 
to put their impeachment and leadership woes behind them. GOP 
leaders greatly hoped to pass the budget resolution easily, 
without any embarrassing intraparty wrangling, before the break 
so that it can be finalized by the April 15 statutory deadline, a 
feat seldom accomplished in recent years. 
	     Shuster, however, had other ideas. Namely, to preserve 
the inviolability of the aviation trust fund by ensuring that it 
will not be used for anything but airport-related projects. New 
Speaker or not, Shuster wasn't about to go along with a budget 
resolution that didn't recognize the separate, special status of 
aviation dollars, and he wasn't about to shelve his priorities 
for the sake of party unity. So he threatened to oppose the 
budget resolution--a declaration that had to be taken seriously 
at a time when the GOP has only a six-seat majority. 
	     Not only did Shuster seek to preserve billions in 
aviation trust fund dollars. He also stepped up the pressure for 
large spending increases as part of his proposed Federal Aviation 
Administration reauthorization bill. At a time of stringent 
spending constraints imposed by the bipartisan 1997 budget 
agreement, Shuster's moves take more than a dash of chutzpah. 
	     So for a couple of days last week, House Republicans held 
their breath while their leaders held a series of closed-door 
meetings with Shuster to try to work out some compromise before 
the budget resolution hit the House floor. As Shuster headed into 
one negotiating session on March 23, he made clear in comments to 
reporters that he was playing hardball: ''We're going to 
battlefields on this. It's going to be quite a fight.'' The 
influential chairman didn't speak of enlisting other lawmakers to 
oppose the budget resolution, but the possibility certainly 
existed that plenty of Transportation Committee Republicans would 
follow his lead. 
	     In the end, both sides agreed to postpone a knock-down on 
the House floor. The leaders agreed that aviation taxes would not 
be used on other programs until the House votes on Shuster's FAA 
reauthorization bill. The agreement sets aside $ 18 billion in the 
budget resolution over five years, and $ 54 billion over 10 years, 
for increased aviation spending, although House members could 
vote later against spending the entire amount. 
	     Republican leaders got what they wanted: The House passed 
the budget resolution on the night of March 25, albeit by a 
nearly party-line vote of 221-208. But in the process, the 
leaders had to promise to give Shuster what he wanted--at least 
for now. And the new Speaker got quite a case of heartburn along 
the way. 
	     There's no reason to believe that Hastert can't expect 
more of the same from Shuster in coming months. When asked if he 
could identify another lawmaker who would be this combative this 
early in a new Speaker's tenure, Norman J. Ornstein, a resident 
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy 
Research and a longtime student of Congress, replied: ''No. I 
can't think of anybody else who even approaches Shuster in terms 
of his willingness to bull ahead with his own objectives.'' 
	     But as the jockeying for a piece of the government pie 
intensifies, Shuster's argument leaves some senior lawmakers 
cold. ''I'm just very disappointed that there would be the need 
to allow one chairman to, once again, put such a demand on the 
whole Conference,'' said Rep. Christopher H. Shays, R-Conn., a 
senior member of the Budget Committee, in an interview. ''This is 
a budget-busting provision. It is very unfortunate, if he 
succeeds.'' 
	     Shays and others grumble that Shuster has more clout than 
other chairmen simply because he presides over a whopping 75- 
member panel. ''It should never have been allowed. It should have 
been a committee with 45,'' Shays said. ''A bipartisan committee 
with 75 members can really work its will in Congress.'' 
	     Shuster declined to be interviewed for this story, but 
Jack L. Schenendorf, his committee's chief of staff, in an 
interview objected to such statements. ''If this is just Bud 
Shuster or just our committee, we would have only gotten 75 
votes'' if the aviation funding proposal was debated on the House 
floor, Schenendorf said. ''But I think it would get over 300 
votes. . . . How does somebody justify using aviation taxes--that 
go into the trust fund--to finance some other purpose?'' 
	     ''The committee wasn't blackmailing the leadership into 
doing what we wanted,'' Schenendorf added. ''It was saying, let 
the House decide whether it wants to make this modest adjustment 
to the budget resolution to maintain the integrity of the 
aviation trust fund.'' 
	     Such comments presage the brutal battles to come later 
this year, when the FAA reauthorization bill is debated and when 
appropriators try to sort out the Republicans' competing spending 
priorities. But Shuster is steadfast because he sees a matter of 
principle at stake. It's a breach of public trust, he has argued, 
to use money specifically collected for transportation purposes 
on other programs. 
	     Last year, Shuster spent plenty of time making that case 
during his relentless effort to pass a massive highway bill. It 
ended up being the largest public works program in history. In 
that legislation, the special status of highway and transit funds 
was protected through the creation of ''fire walls'' that set 
minimum levels of funding, to insure that appropriators could not 
siphon the transportation funds off for other programs. $
	     The highway battle taught Shuster to be wary of promises 
made during high-stakes budget wars. He had felt misled by the 
leaders who predated Hastert, when two years ago his floor 
amendment to greatly boost highway spending nearly derailed the 
budget resolution. In that case, the leaders twisted arms, 
cajoled, and threatened the GOP troops on the House floor into 
the wee hours of the morning until Shuster's amendment was 
finally defeated. 
	     ''I had been promised that I was going to be given a fair 
shot,'' Shuster told National Journal in 1997. ''What that meant 
was that I'd be given a fair shot so long as I was going to lose. 
In the past two years (1996-97), I have not been negotiated with 
in good faith by the leadership.'' 
	     In the coming months, Shuster surely will strive to hold 
House leaders to their recent agreement on aviation funding. Even 
if he's successful and the House supports him, however, Shuster 
and his committee have an uphill battle to bring the Senate 
along. Senators oppose, at least for now, giving aviation funds 
the same protections as those afforded for highway and transit 
funding. The Senate in its budget resolution last week rejected 
fire walls for aviation. 
	     Even as Shuster seems to relish being in the center of 
high-profile policy battles, he's had to deal with ongoing 
investigations into his personal conduct. The House Standards of 
Official Conduct (Ethics) Committee is pursuing a probe to 
examine, among other things, Shuster's relationship with his 
former chief of staff Ann M. Eppard, a transportation lobbyist 
who faces criminal charges in connection with the $ 11 billion 
''Big Dig'' highway project in Boston. The ethics committee is 
also looking into whether Shuster committed violations of House 
rules and/or federal law in his latest three reelection 
campaigns. 
	     Despite the uncertainty that such investigations create, 
the intense Shuster shows no signs of being distracted. Still, he 
may well be feeling just a bit wistful. Subject to the six-year 
term limit imposed on GOP House committee chairmen, he will have 
to step down from his Transportation perch at the end of the 
106th Congress. His reported efforts to look into the possibility 
of taking the reins of the Select Committee on Intelligence, 
should the GOP retain control, went nowhere. Hastert shot that 
down because Shuster had served on that panel for four of the 
previous six Congresses--the limit under House rules. 
	     What does all of this portend? That one of the House's 
flashiest power brokers may find himself without a gavel--and the 
power that comes with it--in the next Congress. House GOP leaders 
ought to be forgiven for smiling at that prospect.