White House Plea on NEA Resisted; Showdown Next?

With the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts declaring that “our very existence is in question,” the White House on Wednesday urged Congress to consider a stopgap legislative cooling-off period to try to resolve the impasse over the NEA’s reauthorization. The plan would reduce the NEA’s reauthorization from the proposed five years to three years or perhaps even one year.

But the White House plan immediately encountered withering bipartisan resistance in the House. Both Republican and Democratic members of a subcommittee trying to fashion a bill to extend the legislative life of the NEA for another five years agreed the crisis is at such a level that it would be better to have a showdown over the NEA now and get it over with.

The day’s events also illustrated the extreme volatility of the NEA political crisis. Earlier in the morning, the General Accounting Office said that an investigation it undertook at the request of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who complained the NEA was illegally funding obscene work, had exonerated the agency.

However, Henry Wray, the GAO’s senior associate general counsel, said the office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, had concluded that the NEA had acted properly when it instituted a requirement that grant recipients sign the equivalent of an anti-obscenity pledge in order to get their money.

The controversial requirement, which has been greeted by a firestorm of opposition from artists and arts groups, has already led to rejection of at least three major NEA grants and the filing of a lawsuit by the New School for Social Research in New York seeking a court ruling that the requirement is unconstitutional.

The indirect exchange over the fate of the NEA occurred in two different subcommittee hearings here. In the Senate, NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer floated the White House proposal at an afternoon hearing before a subcommittee chaired by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) that technically was taking testimony on the NEA’s 1991 appropriation bill.

“We have a dilemma, senator, and I want you to know I’m aware of it,” Frohnmayer told Byrd in a dramatic appearance that came after the NEA chief and a top aide attended a White House meeting Tuesday afternoon. The NEA officials were reportedly urged by aides to Chief of Staff John Sununu to find a solution to the NEA crisis.

“We are making every effort to fix it (the crisis),” Frohnmayer said. “None of us needs this problem. The arts should be a glory to Congress.”

The White House meeting came as Frohnmayer attempted damage control in the NEA’s latest political collision--in which he ousted his top deputy in a clash over style and philosophy--that threatened to bring down anew the fury of conservatives in Congress and in the Administration.

At immediate issue was Frohnmayer’s displacement of Alvin S. Felzenberg, a former New Jersey arts official who took over as the NEA’s senior deputy chairman in February. But NEA sources said that the White House meeting’s main focus was on the NEA’s growing inability to contain and resolve the political controversy that has dogged it for the last 14 months, in which conservatives led by Helms have condemned the endowment for funding a small number of controversial artworks.

At the Senate hearing, Frohnmayer noted that a special commission created to study the NEA last year had only held its first organizational meeting earlier in the day. The special commission, which named New York University president and former congressman John Brademas and Washington lawyer Leonard Garment as its co-chairmen, was originally to have presented its recommendations for NEA reform by now, but delays in naming its members have delayed the process for several months.

Noting specifically that the White House had endorsed the proposal, Frohnmayer suggested that the term of legislation to reauthorize the NEA be shortened--with retention of the NEA’s legislative status quo so the study commission could have time to complete its work.

The effort was an obvious attempt to buy time that came as NEA supporters in both parties and in the Administration have started to acknowledge that the political climate in Congress may make it impossible to renew the agency without drastic restrictions on the type of art it can fund.

“There is no reason for us to try to deny our responsibilities,” said Rep. Tom Coleman (R-Mo.). “We ought to face them head-on. The Administration is like a car careening from proposal to proposal.”

Shortening the term of the reauthorization, Coleman contended, “simply puts all these issues back on the floor. The saga continues. This proposal is the wrong proposal at the wrong time.”

At one point in a House hearing on the NEA Wednesday morning, Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), chairman of the subcommittee, asserted that the arts endowment’s situation amounts to a clear danger that the United States could, for the first time, officially endorse censorship of art by the federal government.

“We begin to uncork the vessel and the genie of censorship is leaking out,” Williams contended. But he said delaying the attempt to reauthorize the endowment would not solve the agency’s problems, and might even make them worse. “A job far more important than whether we are going to fund the NEA,” he said, “is to quickly stuff the cork back in the bottle.”

Williams first suggested a strategy of reauthorizing the NEA for a year on status quo terms, an attempt to get the legislative action out of the heat of 1990 congressional campaigns. He cast the strategy aside weeks ago, concluding that the delay might backfire and would not materially reduce the difficulties facing the federal arts agency.

The White House proposal to resuscitate the delaying tactic came as officials apparently concluded that the NEA crisis had escalated to such a degree that the political effects might soon reach President Bush. Coleman and Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-Wis.) are co-authors of a plan that would split off 60% of the NEA’s money in a block-grant program for state arts councils. Although the executive director of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, which floated a similar plan of its own last month, testified that his members now oppose the concept, Coleman vowed to press on with the legislation.

Expressing a mixture of consternation, awe and pity that has grown steadily more common here in the last month, Williams complained that the federal government’s chief cultural enterprise had been brought to the threshold of collapse by “a few right-wing evangelical political cuckoos.”