McKeon Learns New Role as Head of House Panel : Congress: Eager to win passage of key bill, sophomore lawmaker gets crash course in art of crafting legislation.

With a bang of his gavel, Rep. Howard (Buck) McKeon, a brand-new subcommittee chairman, has just called a meeting to order and is trying to trudge ahead. But his Democratic colleagues are waging partisan war, attempting to exploit the Santa Clarita congressman’s inexperience.

They’re stalling. They’re arguing. They’re introducing amendments left and right aimed at blocking McKeon from advancing his first significant piece of legislation, a complicated consolidation of the nation’s more than 150 job-training programs.

“Point of order!” a Democrat shouts, cutting McKeon off in mid-sentence just as the hearing begins.

“Parliamentary inquiry!” another pipes in a moment later, clearly trying to fluster the good-natured sophomore Republican.

They call for a recess, saying they were not properly notified of the meeting. They introduce amendments, laughable ones, and then amend their own amendments. To drive McKeon up the wall, they even demand that the clerk read the entire bill aloud, bureaucratic word by bureaucratic word.

Luckily for McKeon, this nightmarish meeting unfolding before him is only a drill.

The “Democrats” attempting to rile him are in reality Republican aides. The session McKeon is presiding over is a dress rehearsal arranged by his staff two days before the actual gathering of McKeon’s subcommittee on postsecondary education, training and lifelong learning.

So when the partisan rancor gets especially intense during this practice session, the subcommittee staffers stop the action to give the congressman advice.

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And McKeon readily admits that he needs the tutoring. After all, less than three years ago, he was a Santa Clarita councilman handling laws nowhere near as complicated as the Consolidated and Reformed Education, Employment and Rehabilitation Systems Act of 1995.

“I didn’t know anything about committees or how legislation worked,” McKeon said of his arrival in Congress in January, 1993. “This is major. There are not too many sophomores who are going to be carrying a bill like this.”

Known as the CAREERS Act, the bill turns a web of 151 education, training and employment-assistance programs into four grants to the states, an idea that gibes nicely with McKeon’s desire to downsize the federal bureaucracy and bring it closer to home.

Eager to win House passage, McKeon is learning, on the run, the art of crafting legislation.

He is juggling disagreements among the Clinton Administration, House Democrats and interest groups ranging from the National Governors Assn. to a group of American Samoans from Southern California. Not even fellow Republicans are united behind his plan.

So McKeon’s days are filled with strategy sessions with the committee staffers actually drafting the bill’s language, visits by lobbyists eager to leave their mark and meetings with colleagues whose votes will decide whether it passes or fails.

“Last year, Republicans were pretty irrelevant, and I just didn’t pay a lot of attention,” McKeon said of the Democratic-controlled 103rd Congress. “I don’t think we ever held any subcommittee meetings--maybe one or two. I mean, it was a nothing deal. Right now, we are moving. We are doing a lot of things. I’ve really had to learn a lot.”

And job training is not the only item on McKeon’s legislative plate.

His subcommittee has also taken on a controversial restructuring of federal student loans, which the GOP estimates will save up to $12 billion over five years by ending the subsidy that college students now receive on interest while they are still in school.

That proposal has prompted visits to McKeon’s office by college presidents and education lobby groups in recent weeks and prompted a flow of mail from angry college students.

And then there was the hearing McKeon conducted this month investigating whether backers of women’s sports have pushed Title IX, the equal-opportunity section of the Education Amendments of 1972, so far that it is damaging men’s athletics. The hearing room was packed, and the arguments were heated. McKeon held the hearing at the request of Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), a friend and the chief deputy majority whip, but McKeon has no immediate plans for legislation.

Last week’s practice session in the Rayburn House Office Building was McKeon’s first experience, though imaginary, in leading a markup, which is a critical step in shaping legislation in advance of a vote on the House floor. If the markup job is done well, the bill emerges from subcommittee with bipartisan support and without a host of amendments chipping away at its true intent.

When the real hearing began Wednesday, McKeon was ready for battle.

He had learned that any member can insist that the clerk read the entire 200-plus-page bill--a delaying tactic that Democrats have used this year during consideration of a welfare reform bill. He had learned that he should summarily discard any amendment that is not directly relevant to job training. And he had learned the importance of pounding the gavel until those attempting to steal control of the meeting pipe down.

But the Democrats, the real ones, were nowhere near as mischievous when McKeon finally settled into the chairman’s seat, his script laid out before him, for the real thing.

In fact, they were downright docile.

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Rep. Pat Williams of Montana doled out lavish praise for McKeon’s bipartisan approach to the legislation. The subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Williams had joined McKeon on a visit to several job-training sites in McKeon’s district last month, including the Antelope Valley Aerospace Career Planning Center and the West Valley Occupational Center.

“I want to commend the chairman and the good people on his side who have really learned this issue and are trying to do it correctly,” said Williams, using language not heard too often amid the current partisan rancor on Capitol Hill.

There are still points of disagreement to be worked out, Williams noted, but he called the draft legislation “a pretty good bill.”

The only conflict during the hearing came when Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) introduced an amendment to ensure that any oversight boards created in the bill have a diverse makeup. Republicans rejected that because it might be misinterpreted as an endorsement of quotas.

A frustrated Becerra also wanted the government to compile data on how the programs are working for women and racial minorities. McKeon gently persuaded Becerra to withdraw his amendment, saying the suggestion could best be worked out during negotiations in the coming days.

In the end, McKeon’s bill sailed through subcommittee without objection. He had set aside an entire day for the process; it took him an hour and a half.

With the markup complete, the bill goes next to the Economics and Educational Opportunities Committee, a 43-member panel chaired by Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.). It is there that the bill will face a more intense scrutiny.

And McKeon’s job is beginning all over again. As the prime sponsor, he will present the bill in committee this week and will be called upon to defend it against attack. Behind the scenes, he will plug the bill to colleagues.

Then there are the kinks that must still be worked out.

So far, the restructuring of job training has been debated without mentioning how much money the newfangled programs will get. Some Democrats fear that the bill’s sponsors may be gutting job training by slimming it down and then hacking away its budget.

Calling the proposed Republican cuts “penny-wise but pound-foolish,” Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich said that reductions in job-training funds would come back to haunt the GOP.

“When Americans examine the Republican budget and see that Republicans want to slash education and job training, . . . I don’t think they’re going to buy it,” Reich said in an interview.

But McKeon, a former businessman, argues that the consolidation will save millions of dollars in overhead and provide better service for those seeking job training. Funding for job training will decline, McKeon agrees, but he says the restructuring will allow service to actually improve.

Besides the funding, which will ultimately be determined by House Republicans higher on the totem pole than McKeon, a number of other uncertainties remain.

State governors, for example, want as much freedom as they can get to spend the job-training funds. But some lawmakers are insisting on strict rules to ensure that the federal money is not misused.

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And many of the groups that now have their own specialized job-training programs on the books--veterans, inmates, Native Americans, migrant farm workers and American Samoans, for instance--are anxious about how they will fare under the consolidation.

McKeon, relishing his new role as arbiter, has been attempting to forge a compromise.

“To me the most important thing is getting this done--it’s taking 151 programs down to four, it’s getting a lot of the bureaucracy out of there, it’s getting this money down to the people that need it,” McKeon said. “So there are a lot of details I’m not all that concerned with. If someone has a hang-up on one area, I can work with them.”

McKeon also has a rival bill, introduced by a fellow Republican, to deal with.

Rep. Bill Zeliff of New Hampshire has told McKeon that the differences between their plans are too vast to merge the bills into one. Zeliff would consolidate the myriad job-training programs into a single grant to the states--instead of the four grants called for in McKeon’s plan--and give governors even more flexibility on spending.

But because McKeon is chairman of the subcommittee overseeing the matter, it is likely that it will be his bill that will reach the House floor for a vote.

Still, McKeon already has resigned himself to the fact that there will be flaws in the legislation on which he is working so hard.

“I don’t think it’s going to be perfect,” he acknowledged even before the bill’s final language had been agreed upon.

“This is not a perfect process. We are just bound to make mistakes, and we don’t know what’s going to happen when the regulators get the bill and start to write regulations or when somebody reads them in Timbuktu and misinterprets them.”

But that prospect is not paralyzing him.

The bill can always be tinkered with after it is passed, he says. And he is too busy to dwell on potential flaws. After all, there are votes to round up and negotiations to iron out. And McKeon, new to this world of give-and-take, is having too much fun.

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BACKGROUND

The Consolidated and Reformed Education, Employment and Rehabilitation Systems Act of 1995 (H.R. 1617) would consolidate 151 federal education, training and employment-assistance programs into four block grants to the states. The grants would focus on youth development, adult training, adult education and literacy, and vocational rehabilitation. The CAREERS Act was introduced by Rep. Howard (Buck) McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.) and numerous Republican co-sponsors. Democrats have expressed support for the restructuring, which will be considered by the House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee this week. But they say they oppose the related job-training cuts called for in GOP budget proposals.