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WASHINGTON — The confrontation was a media delight.
It was the old king against the new king; teacher against protege; the husband of a coal miner’s daughter against the judge from New England.
By the margin of a single vote, 50-49, Sen. George J. Mitchell defeated an amendment sponsored by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the man he replaced as Senate majority leader last year, that members of Congress feared would scuttle the nation’s first clean-air bill in a decade. Sen. William S. Cohen also voted against the amendment.
If the wide-ranging bill went down to defeat, Mitchell warned, there would not be another in this century. The White House had warned that President George Bush would veto the clean-air bill had the Senate adopted Byrd’s amendment.
A final vote on the overall Senate bill has been scheduled for Tuesday.
“Passage is not assured yet,” Mitchell said, “but we’ve moved very far toward that objective.”
Mitchell said that the press made too much of the parliamentary battle between himself and Byrd.
The confrontation, one senator told the Washington Post, was as simple as this:
“Bob Byrd’s coal is killing George Mitchell’s trees.”
“It’s being perceived as a test of who’s really running the place … a test of whether Mitchell is just running (the Senate) at the sufferance of Robert C. Byrd,” said another senator.
After stepping down as majority leader in 1989, Byrd became president pro tempore of the Senate and assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee, posts that give Byrd sway over the upper chamber’s complicated parliamentary rules and budget purse strings.
The dispute between Mitchell and Byrd over the clean-air bill dates back to Mitchell’s arrival in the Senate. The first bill the Maine senator introduced in 1980 called for a national cleanup of acid rain pollution. For 10 years, the bill got nowhere largely because Byrd feared that such a cleanup would cause widespread layoffs of coal miners in his state.
High-sulfur coal from West Virginia is considered a principal source of acid rain pollution.
When Mitchell assumed the majority leader’s post, Byrd gave up the battle against environmental controls, but insisted that the federal government provide huge unemployment benefits to coal miners who would be thrown out of work.
Byrd’s first demand was a benefit program that would, by one estimate, total $1.37 billion. A series of compromises with Mitchell knocked the cost down to between $300 million and $500 million.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 miners in the East would lose their jobs because of diminished utility demand for high-sulfur coal. Altogether, 15,000 high-sulfur coal mining jobs could be lost by the year 2000, the EPA said.
Byrd’s proposal would have paid those miners — whose average annual salary is $36,000 — a portion of their former earnings and benefits for three years, and offer them retraining.
When the White House balked at the cost of the plan, Mitchell and Republican Senate Leader Robert Dole offered a compromise that would provide assistance to displaced miners patterned after an existing federal trade-adjustment program. The compromise would pay benefits to a wide range of workers affected by the clean-air bill, with higher benefits for workers in areas of high-unemployment and industries such as coal mining.
The one-vote loss was a tough pill for Byrd to swallow.
“Win or lose, we did what we thought was right,” he said, promising to be a gracious loser.
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