NEWS ANALYSIS : Ties to Sununu Help Block Nominations : Conservatives Wielding Influence in White House

The conservative lobby, often at loggerheads with President Bush in the past, today enjoys easy access to the White House, likes the Administration’s positions on most domestic issues and has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to veto presidential nominations it finds objectionable.

Indeed, in quietly preventing the nomination of former Rep. M. Caldwell Butler (R-Va.) to head the Legal Services Corp., militant conservatives demonstrated that they could block the appointment of even a popular conservative with a long record of supporting Bush because they did not like his views on a single issue--abortion.

The key to the conservative lobby’s influence is its close links with White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. The former New Hampshire governor, in addition to consulting with conservatives on presidential appointments, has been readily accessible for consultations on legislation and has arranged for several meetings with Bush at the White House, according to David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and other conservative leaders.

“There’ve been about a half dozen meetings,” said Keene, who called Sununu the conservatives’ “primary champion in the White House.”

“Sununu has been terrific. He has handled himself better than any chief of staff I’ve seen in the 23 years I’ve been in the White House, and I’ve known them all,” said Paul M. Weyrich, chairman of Coalitions for America. “I don’t always get the answer I want, but he’s extremely accessible.”

In the case of Butler, who was to have been nominated as chairman of the 11-member board of the Legal Services Corp., which Congress created to provide legal help for the poor, Sununu decided at the last minute that he should undergo an interrogation session with conservative activists. When they objected to Butler’s answers on abortion-related issues, the conservatives persuaded the White House to back away from the nomination.

“I just couldn’t believe they were that powerful,” said Butler, who has known Bush since serving in the House during 1973-83.

Other Nominations Blocked

The Butler case is not unique.

Earlier, conservative activists had blocked several other nominations, including those of Robert B. Fiske Jr., a prominent New York lawyer, to be the No. 2 Justice Department official; Drew E. Altman, New Jersey human services commissioner, to head the Medicare and Medicaid program of Health and Human Services; and Robert Fulton, Oklahoma’s cabinet secretary of social services, to head the HHS welfare program.

In addition to those cases, “there have been lots of others that haven’t been so public,” said Weyrich, who would not elaborate.

In interviews, several leaders of the conservative movement, reflecting on the scuttling of Butler’s nomination, said that, in some ways, they have more clout with Bush than they did with President Ronald Reagan despite the fact that they have been much closer politically and ideologically to Reagan.

“Except in the area of public policy, we have at least as much, if not more, impact on the Bush Administration than we had on the Reagan Administration,” Weyrich said. “The Bush Administration has a reputation for being more pragmatic, and, in a way, that’s actually helpful. You explain an issue that would impact on them and they take it seriously and listen to you. That’s unlike the Reagan Administration, which did everything they did because of the image it would project on the 6 o’clock news.”

Even in the area of public policy, conservative leaders have been in agreement with most of Bush’s domestic programs. They generally support his tax policies (no new taxes and a reduction in capital gains taxes), his enforcement-oriented drug program and his strong stands opposing gun controls and favoring a constitutional amendment prohibiting desecration of the American flag.

Only on foreign policy has the conservative lobby marked out substantial differences with Bush. Even there, in most instances they have not been overly critical.

Militant conservatives fault Bush for not moving forcefully to oust Panamanian leader Manuel A. Noriega and for not being more supportive of the Nicaragua rebels. They are unhappy with the Administration’s scaled-back support for “Star Wars.” And they think Bush has been too supportive of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform programs, but they were even more critical of Reagan on that point.

Impact on Appointments

On the surface, at least, the conservatives’ biggest impact with the Bush Administration has been on presidential appointments.

In an article written for the Washington Post, Fulton said that he, Fiske and Altman were victims of aggressive lobbying by the “hard right-wing” and a White House personnel appointment process that is “potentially poisoning relations with the mainstream of the Republican Party.”

Fulton, who describes himself as having “a solid Republican background” with more than 33 years’ experience in federal and state government, wrote that “Sununu, himself far to the right of the Republican mainstream, has created a substantial network of right-wing ‘transition’ staff and other insiders whose lifeblood is politics rather than government. Having little appreciation of the difficult challenge of running government, they believe appointments should provide political rewards and always be made with an eye to the next election.”

The Butler case is a prime example of how the conservative leaders’ ties to Sununu can give them veto power even when the candidate for nomination is eminently qualified, has strong conservative credentials and has substantial congressional support. A letter signed by 32 members of a conservative bloc in the House, including Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), endorsed the nomination.

Butler, who supported legislation that created the Legal Services Corp. in 1974 during the Richard M. Nixon Administration and helped it survive an attack by conservative activists in 1981 in the first year of the Reagan Administration, did not seek out the nomination. He was asked by Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) to be a candidate for the job.

McCollum said he thought Butler was highly qualified for the post but that several conservative activists “who were historically unhappy with him when he was in Congress had doubts about him. So I reported that to Sununu, and he wanted to make everybody as happy as he could, so he said there should be a meeting to dispel their doubts.

“Sununu was not willing to proceed without having that meeting. He wanted all the bases covered,” McCollum said. “And it seemed the logical thing to do.”

Met With Coalition

At McCollum’s request, Butler traveled to Washington from his home in Roanoke, Va., to meet with the National Legal Services Reform Coalition, a group formed by conservative leaders who, having been unsuccessful in trying to abolish the agency, have been lobbying to control its board and therefor its operations.

About 10 persons attended the session, including Weyrich, Keene and Howard J. Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus. Phillips is such a hard-line conservative and still so strongly favors abolishing the Legal Services Corp. that he has not joined the reform coalition.

In answer to their questions, Butler said he thought a pregnant woman would be entitled to receive advice on her legal rights to an abortion from a Legal Services attorney, a view they declared was “totally unacceptable.”

They also found unacceptable his statement that Legal Services could sue a hospital that refused to provide a Medicaid-financed abortion to a poor person, a view they insisted conflicts with a provision of the Legal Services law that bars most abortion legal action.

‘They Had Abandoned Me’

The White House, said Butler, subsequently “notified me that the nomination was politically undoable, which is a euphemism for saying they had abandoned me.” White House officials confirmed his account.

Butler, a widely respected attorney and former five-term congressman, said he was “offended” by the way he had been rejected and by the obvious power the conservative lobby enjoys at the White House.

“I really shouldn’t have gone to that meeting,” said Butler, who found Phillips’ questioning particularly “hostile.”

“What really upset me was they seemed to be looking for a chink in my armor to exploit,” he added.

Phillips, who has been so sharply critical of Bush in the past that the President refuses to meet with him even though he has met with the other conservative leaders, said he opposed Butler because he would use “taxpayer funds to advance the pro-abortion cause.”

Keene said that “Butler’s a gentleman, and a lot of us liked him personally” and that during the questioning of him Butler “sympathized with many of the concerns we expressed about the way the program is operated. But he made it fairly clear that, as chairman, he wouldn’t see it as his business to do much about it, that Congress should address it.”

And it “created outrage” among some members, Keene said, when Butler expressed his views on Legal Services and abortion matters.

Later, Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), a champion of the Legal Services Corp. who supported the nomination, said he told Sununu, a friend and former New Hampshire governor, he thought it was “bad form to drop the nomination in light of all the support Butler had.”