Rohrabacher Seeks Tighter NEA Controls

Declaring victory in his fight to rein in the National Endowment for the Arts, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) said on Wednesday that he will offer an amendment to a bill to renew the arts agency that would clamp tight controls over the kinds of art that can legally get federal support.

Rohrabacher’s entry into what has become nearly a competition among senators and congressmen to draft language restricting the content of NEA-supported art came as behind-the-scenes negotiations continued in both the House and Senate to decide what kind of restrictive standards will govern the endowment.

The situation appeared to underscore a reality broadly perceived in Congress and among arts supporters that the 14-month controversy has reached a point where any bill to renew the NEA will include some form of restrictive language governing art content.

“The debate’s over and we won,” said Rohrabacher defiantly. “The entire direction (in which the fight is going) is in the direction of at least having standards” for the specific kinds of art the NEA can fund.

But, in declaring victory, Rohrabacher also conceded in an interview Wednesday morning that his chief goal when he began an attack on the NEA last year--outright abolition of the agency--is unattainable and that the arts agency will survive, though its freedom to operate may be significantly reduced.

Rohrabacher said, however, that if a parliamentary maneuver thwarts the addition of restrictions, he will turn his attention to a fight over the arts agency’s appropriation--a separate bill expected to come up for action late next month--with the objective of eliminating all money for the NEA and effectively killing it.

However, he conceded that the effort to eliminate all appropriations would be largely symbolic.

“I doubt we’re going to get this thing zeroed out,” he said. “My count (of prospective votes on issue) seems to be that we will probably continue to have an NEA. The bottom line is the government is going to be involved in financing of the arts.” Rohrabacher’s district straddles portions of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

On Tuesday, a House committee sent a restriction-free NEA bill to the full House for debate next month, but no observers believe that the so-called “clean” bill--proposed by President Bush--will survive without major amendments. A Senate committee is to take up the bill next week. Floor votes in both chambers are expected in late July, but the NEA’s fate will probably not be finally known until September when a conference committee takes up the two different versions.

In proposing his own content-control language, Rohrabacher entered an already crowded field in which at least two other initiatives are under way in the House and Senate to fashion restrictions on NEA funding. But Rohrabacher’s version, which is being circulated in draft form in the House, goes significantly further than any other proposal that has surfaced so far. The proposed Rohrabacher amendment to the pending NEA reauthorization bill would:

* Ban support for any artwork that is not only obscene, but shows--or even describes--”in a patently offensive way,” any organs or activities related to sex or human excretory functions.

* Declare that no NEA money could go to arts projects whose effect would be one of “denigrating the beliefs, tenets or objects of a particular religion” or denigration “on the basis of race, sex, handicap or national origin.”

* Prohibit money being awarded to an arts project that addresses, in any way, the mutilation, burning or trampling of the American flag, or even a work in which a flag is placed on the floor.

* Require that no NEA grant could include any depiction of “matter that includes any part of an actual human embryo or fetus.”

* Decree that all federally funded art would have to conform to a controversial 1988 federal child pornography statute that was declared unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court judge here last year and is awaiting a hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

(The law, the constitutionality of which was challenged in a class action lawsuit filed by the American Library Assn., requires photographers, artists, book publishers and other media organizations to maintain records establishing that they verified the ages of every model who appeared in their work nude retroactively to Feb. 6, 1978. The appeals court has received briefs from the class action plaintiffs and the Justice Department in the case. Oral arguments are scheduled for September.)

Separately, Jacob Neusner, a member of the the National Council on the Arts who has been a consistent critic of decisions to fund controversial projects, contended to an audience at a conservative think tank that NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer should strongly consider resigning. Speaking to a noontime seminar Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation, Neusner asserted that Frohnmayer’s stewardship since he took over last October has amounted to “stonewalling” that has “turned a disaster into a total catastrophe.”

Frohnmayer and Neusner have been estranged since early May, when Neusner publicly criticized a series of grant-making decisions at the NEA after the national council voted to defer action on 18 performance fellowship grants because some council members objected to work produced by five of the potential fellows.

Since that time, Neusner has developed a campaign of criticism directed at Frohnmayer’s handling of a variety of difficult situations at the NEA. Frohnmayer, who declined to be interviewed, has kept a deliberately low profile in recent weeks--apparently at the encouragement of the White House. He has canceled most public appearances and granted no interviews.