Budget Plan Sparks Fire Between Sen. Byrd, Treasury Secretary

Tensions between Congress and the White House over the president’s budget exploded Thursday when a debate over congressional prerogatives turned into an unusually bitter and personal exchange involving two of Washington’s most powerful figures: Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill.

The spat rocked an otherwise routine Senate Budget Committee hearing, where the normal dance of senatorial courtesy--and polite groveling by administration witnesses--suddenly vanished. O’Neill, telling Byrd he wouldn’t “cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch,” seemed to struggle with his emotions by often taking deep breaths.

Byrd, 84, chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee and is arguably the fiercest defender of Congress’ interests. He spent 15 minutes berating O’Neill, a straight-talking former corporate executive, for a speech the secretary made last year asserting that congressional rules “created by just ordinary people” are “like the Lilliputians tying us to the ground.”

Byrd noted that the administration’s glossy new budget document includes a cartoon of Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians. He denounced the cartoon--one of several illustrations of White House sentiments and criticisms--as “nonsense” that belittled how Congress represents the interests of Americans.

Since Monday’s release of President Bush’s budget plan, which vividly pokes fun at alleged congressional pork, lawmakers from both parties have bristled at the administration’s rhetoric. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young (R-Fla.), sent a tart letter Wednesday to the White House budget director, saying that “all wisdom on the allocation of grant funding does not reside in the executive branch.”

“A lot of us were here before you came,” Byrd sternly told O’Neill at Thursday’s hearing. He noted that he’d seen many secretaries of the Treasury during his half century in Congress and that no one elected O’Neill. “With all respect to you, you are not Alexander Hamilton,” Byrd said.

O’Neill, 66, paused about 20 seconds before answering, his eyes appearing to glisten. His voice cracked as he spoke. He took deep breaths between sentences, repeatedly clenching his hands, seeming to collect his thoughts to try to hold his temper.

He said he stood by his statements. “What I had in my mind and what I deeply believe is this,” he said, taking a deep breath. “That where we have rules made by men that restrict the realization of human potential, they should be changed.”

O’Neill then took two more deep breaths before adding pointedly: “We had rules that said, ‘Colored don’t enter here.’ That was a man-made rule.” Byrd, in his youth, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Byrd glared at O’Neill. “I’ve been here a long time,” he said. “I try to live by the rules,” noting that the rule O’Neill had criticized as Lilliputian is known in Congress as the Byrd Rule. The rule generally requires 60 votes in the 100-member Senate on key elements of tax bills and is the main reason why the president’s tax cut expires in 2010.

O’Neill, who earned $59 million as Alcoa chairman in the year before he became Treasury secretary, said he resented Byrd’s earlier suggestion that he’d been born to wealth.

“Senator, I started my life in a house without water or electricity, so I don’t cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch,” said O’Neill, whose father was an Army sergeant and then a veterans’ hospital attendant.

“Well, Mr. Secretary,” Byrd responded, “I lived in a house without electricity too. No running water, no telephone, a little wooden outhouse.”

“I had the same,” interjected O’Neill.

After the hearing, O’Neill was asked if he had tears in his eyes. “That was fire,” he said.