Republicans in Senate Kill Tobacco Bill

After four weeks of passionate debate over landmark legislation designed to stop young people from smoking, Republicans rolled the political dice Wednesday and killed the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who engineered the legislation’s downfall, said that it had strayed from its original purpose and become a typically Democratic big-tax, big-spending bill.

President Clinton and the Democrats, deploring the outcome, lambasted the Republicans for doing Big Tobacco’s bidding and suggested that the issue would come back to haunt them in the November congressional elections.

“If more members of the Senate would vote like parents rather than politicians, we could solve this problem,” Clinton declared.

The bill fell on a pair of procedural votes that sent it back to the Senate Commerce Committee, which had reported it to the Senate floor in April. The measure’s advocates, mostly Democrats, were able to muster only 53 and 57 supporters; a total of 60 votes was needed in both cases.

“You would have to view it as killing the bill,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), its chief author. “The losers are the children of America,” McCain added, his voice shaking slightly at a press conference shortly before the final votes.

California’s two Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, voted for the bill both times.

Democrats, vowing not to let the issue die, said that they would propose attaching the tobacco bill to every piece of legislation on the House and Senate floors, thus forcing Republicans to vote on it over and over again.

“This is not over,” insisted Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “This bill may be dead but tobacco legislation is not dead.”

At the heart of the bill’s defeat was a deadlock over tax increases. Public health advocates have contended that a sharp price increase is the best way to stop kids from starting to smoke and to push adults to quit. For most Republicans, a government-mandated price increase is a tax hike by another name and raising taxes even for the noblest of causes is anathema.

Bolstering the Republicans was a $40-million, three-month advertising campaign by the tobacco industry aimed at killing the measure, as well as a telephone and mail campaign aimed at fence-sitting senators.

Nevertheless, this was the closest Congress had ever come to enacting strict smoking curbs. Many viewed it as a historic opportunity, possible only because of damage suits against the tobacco companies by 40 states.

The states and the companies reached a settlement a year ago that would have given cigarette manufacturers legal protection in future lawsuits in exchange for huge payments to states and submission to strict government regulation. But many of these provisions required federal legislation, and the bill’s demise will send the industry and the states back to courtrooms across America.

By the time the Senate killed the bill, it had stripped out all caps on the industry’s liability in damage suits. The bill included an increase in the price of cigarettes of $1.10 a pack over five years, strict regulation of tobacco products by the Food and Drug Administration and antismoking public health and cancer research programs. The total price tag was $516 billion over 25 years.

The bill also included an array of unrelated provisions that the full Senate had tacked on to the bill, notably major antidrug programs and a substantial cut in the income tax code’s marriage penalty.

Lott said that a slimmed-down antismoking bill, without price increases and spending programs, could still win approval this year.

“We’ve lost sight of the original noble cause of just dealing with teenage smoking and drug abuse,” he said. “I hope that we can convince Senate Democrats and the White House to join us in that effort without again resorting to the big-government, big-tax, big-spending bill that was defeated today.”

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) promptly announced that he would push ahead on slimmed-down legislation. “Our goal is to reduce teen smoking, not increase taxes,” Gingrich said.

The House is considering eliminating the tax deduction for tobacco companies’ advertising expenses and using the tax revenue that would be generated by such a change to pay for public health programs and an antismoking advertising campaign. It also might vote for stricter penalties for adults who sell tobacco to children and for teenagers who are caught with cigarettes.

That is unlikely to satisfy public health advocates, who have said that legislation would be hollow without a substantial price hike as well as strict regulation of the tobacco industry.

“I have spent much of my life working to end the disease and death caused by tobacco,” said former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. “What Sen. Lott and his colleagues have done today is public health malpractice, plain and simple. Ignoring the advice of every public health professional in America, they have chosen to listen only to a handful of televison ads and a lot of [political action] committees.”

Others, however, blamed the public health community for greedily adding so many provisions to the bill to punish the tobacco industry that the legislation lost support.

Responsibility lies “directly at the door of the health crowd--the Koops and Kesslers,” said lawyer John Coale, referring to former FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler.

“Nothing was ever enough from the minute we started to negotiate until today,” said Coale, who has represented smokers who sued the industry over their addiction.

For the tobacco industry, the bill’s demise was a victory. In addition to their national advertising campaign, the companies hired legions of lobbyists in Washington and in the states to bird-dog every member of Congress.

“Very bad legislation has been stopped,” said Scott Williams, a spokesman for the tobacco industry. “It was not comprehensive and it was not about kids. It was about money and taxes.”

However, the victory was somewhat pyrrhic, Williams acknowledged, because the industry had hoped for legislation that would settle all the state lawsuits once and for all and gain future legal protections, so that tobacco firms could predict their losses. “We’re kind of melancholy about today’s results,” Williams said.

In the White House as well as on Capitol Hill, strategists saw the bill’s defeat as a signal that the gloves are off and that the battle to win November’s election had begun.

Rahm Emanuel, assistant to the president on strategy and policy, said that the bill’s death proves that tobacco is a political issue and that some Republicans have taken too much money from tobacco companies to allow a comprehensive antismoking measure to reach the president’s desk.

Moreover, he said, the Senate sought to protect House Republicans from having to vote on the hot-button issue in an election year, when the GOP is fighting to hang onto its slim majority in the House.

“The House elections are razor thin,” Emanuel said. “They want nothing to upset that apple cart and Newt [Gingrich] cannot handle the tobacco bill.”

The bill’s burial was painful for some Republicans as well, particularly McCain, who took on the tobacco bill at Lott’s request and worked on it virtually seven days a week for the last five months.

He blamed the industry advertising campaign for undermining public support and, above all, for intimidating members of Congress by twisting the facts about what was in the bill.

“The tobacco industry has made a wise investment, and they have changed people’s views,” McCain said. “But it’s really a question of whether or not we believe an industry should be allowed to lie and get away with it . . . whether an industry can pay billions in campaign contributions for protection against their misdeeds and get away with it.”

* HOUSE VOTES OUT TAX CODE: The House approved a bill to abolish the tax code and force Congress to replace it. A20