Sununu Calls Congress ‘Too Fair’ to Dissenters

White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu said Friday that Congress is “too fair” because it allows witnesses who hold unorthodox views to receive equal time in presenting testimony on legislation pending before the House and Senate.

Sununu told a conference of House Republicans that the public is likely to receive a distorted view of expert opinion on controversial issues because of Congress’ propensity for letting minority viewpoints be expressed at length during hearings.

“It gives anybody with an idea a platform,” Sununu complained. “You are much too fair.”

He asserted that, even if 99% of expert opinion on pending legislation endorsed the same point of view, Congress would give equal time to the 1% of dissenting witnesses who diverge from the consensus.

In such cases, he said, “You give the impression to the public that it’s a 50-50 issue.”

Sununu, one of Bush’s most trusted advisers, has drawn fire in recent weeks from environmentalists who fear that he is working behind the scenes to weaken the President’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s clean air laws.

As an example of what he characterized as the excessive attention devoted to dissident voices, Sununu mentioned frequent congressional testimony by environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin.

Rifkin is director of the Foundation on Economic Trends, a Washington interest group that has opposed government involvement in genetic research, nuclear energy development and other scientific pursuits.

“There is a difference between a panel from the National Academy of Sciences and Jeremy Rifkin,” Sununu said.

Rifkin, informed of Sununu’s remarks, said that activists outside the scientific community have a fundamental right to help shape public policy on technology and the environment.

“Mr. Sununu’s comments represent the old, tired way of thinking. We’ve left it to the experts, and they’ve given us global warming and nuclear fallout,” Rifkin said.

“Sununu would like the Tory attitude to be reinstituted,” he continued. “We fought a revolution against that. He’s saying leave decision-making up to an inner sanctum of experts. That’s un-American, but a classic Republican view.”

Sununu, who made an unscheduled appearance at the Republican conference on “The Congress of Tomorrow,” complained also that some lawmakers are too eager to introduce legislation on issues generating the most public attention.

“A lot of policy gets made by someone sitting around saying: ‘I’d like to have my name on a bill,’ ” he said.

But most of Sununu’s luncheon remarks to the gathering of about 70 GOP House members were devoted to cooperation between the White House and the Republican minorities in both chambers of Congress in the coming years, citing the clean air legislation as one example.

“There’s going to be a clean air bill,” Sununu said. “It should be a Republican clean air bill.” He said the measure would reflect not only traditional GOP concern about the environment but also concern about the legislation’s impact on costs to industry.

“No one can argue to me that it makes sense for America to take the most extreme solution instead of the most effective solution,” he said.

The top White House aide rejected criticism from some Republicans that the President should not make proposals on the environment, education, health care or other issues on which the Democrats often have taken the initiative in the past.

“The President is going to use his office as a bully pulpit to shape the direction and results of debate,” Sununu said.

Staff writer Shawn Pogatchnik in Washington contributed to this story.