What’s Next in NEA Soap Opera? : News Analysis

This week begins much like a commercial break in the latest episode of a long-running soap opera.

Only it isn’t a TV melodrama. It’s the Perils-of-Pauline struggle of the National Endowment for the Arts being played out in both houses of Congress.

Fourteen months after it began, the central issue remains unchanged. There is no resolution to the political disagreement over whether the fight is about sponsorship or censorship of publicly funded art.

Conservatives argue now--as they have from the beginning--that censorship is not at issue, and that the rights of taxpayers to control the expenditure of their money is.

Arts supporters and civil libertarians counter that nothing in the Bill of Rights lessens First Amendment guarantees of free speech when federal money is supporting it. The arts are the nation’s soul, they argue. The NEA, they contend, is the planter of the cultural seed.

The problem, now as always, is in defining obscenity and anticipating when legitimate artistic expression might be suppressed as obscene--when its problem really was that it ruffled political feathers. The U.S. Supreme Court has historically been uncomfortable with trying to precisely define what obscenity is. The incursion of politically motivated definitions into national arts policy has been widely perceived as dangerous, indeed.

The continuing soap opera has attracted some intriguing bit players. Paul Newman, for instance, slipped into town unannounced and unheralded on May 8 for visits with Senate Republicans, whom arts advocates have identified as perhaps the single most crucial--and difficult--group of people in town.

In the company of a lobbyist, Newman called on the two Republicans many experienced viewers suspect may end up as key voters in the expected climactic confrontation between arts supporters and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the NEA’s chief nemesis.

Newman’s itinerary included conversations with Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.), both of whom have struggled--publicly and privately--to balance the conflicting demands of their constituents and heavy mail from conservative advocacy groups demanding restrictions on the NEA, with the desires of arts advocates and First Amendment organizations opposing the restrictions. Hatch has shown signs of conversion to the cause of artistic freedom, reportedly the end result of a sincere personal reflective process, perhaps abetted by star contact.

A great deal of the soap opera has had its run in public. Just in the last week, for instance, Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), who chairs a House subcommittee charged with originating legislation to extend the NEA’s life for another five years, announced that the endowment’s political problems were severe. As a result, he said he was jettisoning a bill proposed by President Bush to reauthorize the NEA without restrictions on its artistic freedom.

Williams countered by forming a committee of artists and arts advocates to draft alternative legislation. Thirty strong, representing 26 different organizations, the summit group jammed a hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building for several days last week.

Separately, the NEA was sued by a university in New York City--the New School for Social Research--over an endowment requirement that grantees must sign to get their money. The requirement amounts to an anti-obscenity oath, in the university’s view.

And a New York artist, David Wojnarowicz, sued the politically right wing American Family Assn., and its director, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, on grounds of copyright infringement and defamation over an anti-NEA mailing in which Wildmon allegedly impugned the artist’s integrity.

Congress has collectively skipped town until a week from Monday for the traditional Memorial Day recess. When members return, the House may quickly begin to grapple with an alternative bill by Williams to fashion a legislative extension of the NEA.

Beneath this, however, is a delicate, evolving distribution of political power in which the saga of the NEA may turn out to have confounded a great deal of conventional political wisdom. But as of the Memorial Day recess, it is clear that the NEA remains legislatively under siege--its political options becoming ever more limited.

All of this has occurred against a backdrop that has appeared to confound the predictions of some observers who thought three to six months or so ago that they knew how all of this would play out.

It was the conventional wisdom then that in the House, although Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) would launch a floor attack on the NEA, opposition would be comparatively easily overcome, with the most difficult battles occurring later, in the Senate. The scenario has the weight of historical precedent and procedural reality behind it.

The Senate has generally been the place where the NEA has had its greatest troubles. And because the Senate’s rules are much less restrictive than those of the House, an individual senator can bottle up a bill almost at will. The House also has a rule requiring that only amendments germane to a specific bill can be attached to it. In the Senate, no such rule applies--a reality that has permitted Helms to attempt to amend legislation as far afield as a defense appropriations bill with language that would hamstring the NEA.

But though the Senate may still prove as difficult a forum as its advance notices predicted, it has been--to most everyone’s surprise--in the House that the greatest portion of debris has struck the fan blades. Simultaneously with reauthorization, there is also the dilemma of appropriating funds for the NEA for 1991--with legislation pending in the House for that, too. Rep Sidney Yates (D-Ill.), chairman of the House NEA appropriations subcommittee, said last week he is pessimistic about the prospects for a money bill that does not also contain restrictions on art the endowment can support. It was the first time in the controversy that Yates had voiced such pessimism. “As of now, it’s quite chaotic, I think,” Yates said.

It would be fair to say that, in the House, the NEA’s fate literally hangs by the thinnest of threads. It was the recognition of the hopeless prospects of President Bush’s NEA renewal bill, which rejects restrictions of any kind of the content of artworks the agency can support, that led Williams to effectively discard the Bush initiative. Instead, Williams took what he conceded was a high-risk gamble that an arts community summit could produce something the House might pass.

House Republicans--in a surprise move of their own--announced alternative legislation that would completely restructure the formulas by which NEA money is apportioned to state arts councils, and add content-controls to whatever art would be left for the arts endowment to directly support.

That initiative, in turn, opened the way for a nearly successful suicide attempt by the arts community. Arts groups split disastrously when the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies supported the Republican concept--and joined with Reps. Steve Gunderson (R-Wis.) and Tom Coleman (R-Mo.) in proposing ways to implement the Republican plan.

This breakaway move was made at the worst conceivable moment, precipitating a fracture in the arts community just as NEA’s fate may be finally decided. Though the state arts group tried to distance itself from its own proposal last week, the damage was possibly irreparable. The situation lent an eerie prescience to a comment Williams made last year when a reporter asked him if he thought the nation’s arts community was adequately prepared for the political war that lay ahead. Replied Williams, “I see no signs that they are.”

On the Senate side of the Capitol, by contrast, the atmosphere has been strangely quiet.

Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) , chair of the Senate subcommittee handling the NEA reauthorization, has reportedly decided to try to avoid the public acrimony that has beset the effort in the House. Pell has remained largely out of public view on the issue. It was learned that he intends to wait until the last minute--a week before a potentially crucial hearing planned for two to three weeks from now--before he introduces the White House NEA bill in the Senate.

It is believed to still be Pell’s hope that an NEA bill free of content restrictions or potentially calamitous amendment can somehow be navigated through Congress. To that end, Pell and his staff have been quietly working on that crucial subspecies, Senate Republicans. Their targets: Oregon Sens. Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood and Rhode Island’s John Chafee. Hatfield and Packwood are political mentors of NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, a former Portland trial lawyer.

Counting votes in the Senate, say sources familiar with Pell’s strategy, is still premature. And no one has forgotten Helms, who has remained conspicuously silent on the NEA issue in recent months. For the most part, his tactical plans for the NEA have been literally inscrutable.

While Helms has consistently refused to discuss the NEA issue with reporters, in early April, he wrote to R. Philip Hanes, of Winston-Salem, N.C., a longtime Helms friend and, ironically, prominent NEA supporter and arts patron. Helms was replying to a letter in which Hanes had castigated Helms for trying to gut the arts endowment. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘continuing attacks’ on the NEA,” Helms told Hanes defensively. “Our records show that during the past five months I have declined to appear on nationally televised shows on 27 occasions and have accepted no invitations to do so.”

It is widely believed that Helms will attempt to amend the NEA bill on the floor to insert restrictions at least as severe as those he proposed last year. Under the so-called Helms Amendment to the 1990 NEA funding bill, Helms would have banned all support to controversial, offensive and indecent artworks. Most of the amendment was beaten back, but some of its language survived--the obscenity provisions that resulted in the two separate lawsuits filed last week.

Even with Helms still waiting to make his move, though, it has become the sense--more broadly than at any time in the NEA struggle--that the arts endowment simply cannot be reauthorized this year without someone successfully attaching some kind of control over the kind of art the agency may support.

“There is going to be some alternative” to the concept of an unfettered arts endowment, concluded one key lobbyist familiar with the political reality closing in on the NEA. “There is not enough support, in either the House or Senate, to produce a clean bill.”

It is difficult to imagine that the plot of this soap opera could get any thicker, but given the history of the NEA controversy, this should not be discounted.

“Things have gotten a little confused,” said producer Joseph Papp, who turned down a $50,000 NEA grant to his New York Shakespeare Festival and has said he will reject another $400,000 or so if this year’s obscenity pledge isn’t rescinded by the NEA.

“The tide is turnable. Anything that suggests the diminution of the NEA will hurt the average artist in the United States. You have to fight it until the very last moment.”