Word: bill
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Talk about spoiling the broth. Imagine trying to prepare dinner with 199 cooks watching every move. Something like that is happening on Capitol Hill, where a mammoth conference committee is trying to reconcile differences in the omnibus trade bills passed last year by the House and Senate. Under the direction of two Democratic leaders -- Representative Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas -- the 199 members of the committee, along with 300 or so staffers and 100 briefcase carriers sent over by the White House, have been meeting in 17 subgroups in an all-out effort...
...White House has angered Congress on several occasions by turning down pleas for import relief, most notably from the shoe industry. Many Democrats, and a few Republicans as well, are pushing for provisions in the trade bill that would force the Administration to retaliate automatically against unfair foreign traders. The President, though, has vowed to veto any bill that would take away his discretion on when to impose trade sanctions. The conflict has left the Democrats with a dilemma. Explains Rostenkowski: "We need a bill so tough that our trading partners can't ignore it, but so fair that...
Writing such a bill will be no easy task. Just keeping track of the provisions in the House and Senate versions of the bill (each of which weighs about five pounds and runs to more than 1,000 pages) is nearly impossible. "The hardest part is remembering what each member of Congress wants," says a member of Rostenkowski's committee staff, "and what priority he puts on each of his requests." Staffers have been working well into the night and coming in on weekends, their briefcases bulging. Bentsen's group is dubbed the "committee that never sleeps...
...certain which provisions will live or die, but the bill is beginning to look less protectionist than it did just a few weeks ago. One likely casualty is a controversial amendment proposed by Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri to take action against countries that run chronic surpluses with the U.S. and engage in unfair trade practices. It would require the President to impose trade sanctions on those nations that would reduce the surpluses by 10% a year. Gephardt has made trade the central issue of his presidential campaign, but enthusiasm in Washington for his measure has almost disappeared since...
Despite the probable weakening of the Gephardt amendment, several other proposals in the trade bill, including some that are seemingly extraneous, rile the Administration and could invite a veto. One of them would force many companies to give at least 60 days' notice of impending plant closings. The White House opposes as excessively restrictive a section that would require a ban for up to five years on the importation of any products made by Toshiba, the Japanese electronics company, and Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk, a Norwegian government-owned manufacturer of computers and weapons. They were found last year to have violated export...