Road Warriors

By WALTER SHAPIRO

The budget-busting highway bill was more than the troubled President could endure: "Have you looked at the condition of the Treasury, at the amount of money it contains, at the appropriations already made by Congress, at the amount of other unavoidable claims upon it?" That President was Andrew Jackson in 1830, and he had enough political clout to make his veto of the Maysville Road Bill stick. The graveled National Road that aroused Old Hickory's ire has, of course, evolved into today's 44,000-mile Interstate Highway System. But the 19th century conflict between pork barrel and public purse endures as a staple of American democracy, often pitting a fiscally conscious President against a Congress determined to deliver better transportation to the voters who elected it.

So it was again last week as the House, overwhelmingly, and then the Senate, after a stop-and-go drama, overrode Ronald Reagan's veto of the $88 billion highway bill. For a President determined to put the political damage from Iranscam in the rear-view mirror, the final 67-33 defeat in the Senate was an unwelcome reminder of his weakened political condition. But after months of lassitude Reagan put the full force of the presidency into his search for that elusive final vote. In fact, as jarring as the defeat was, it could end up strengthening the President: the personal energy he put into defeating the bill reinforced his image as a warrior against Congress's profligate pork-barrel ways, and it is likely to quiet fears that he is detached, out of touch and content to serve out the last 21 months of his presidency as a ceremonial caretaker.

On the morning of the final vote, Reagan knew the odds were against him: all 54 Senate Democrats opposed him, as did 13 Republican defectors. Even so, he rejected the option posed by Chief of Staff Howard Baker that he quietly accept defeat rather than risk losing more political capital on a hopeless cause. The President also dismissed Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole's warning that his chances of success could be as low as 1 in 100. Instead, with the firm declaration "I want to do it," Reagan traveled the extra mile down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol to plead personally with Senate Republicans for the single vote he needed to sustain his veto.

Meeting with all 46 members of the Republican minority in the ornate Old Senate Chamber, the President began by quoting from the same folk ballad that he used in acknowledging defeat at the 1976 Republican Convention: "I am wounded but not slain. I will rest awhile. But I will rise and fight again." Then Reagan uttered six words that Presidents use sparingly at best: "I beg you for your vote." The G.O.P. Senators, awkwardly divided between loyalists and mavericks, at first responded to the President's plaintive appeal with stiff formality. Then one of the rebels, Senator Steven Symms of Idaho, suggested that all 13 holdouts switch their votes as a bloc. "I wouldn't be the only one to go," said Symms, "but I'd go if I were one of 13."

Buoyed by this glimmer of hope, Reagan met privately with the 13 recalcitrant Republicans in Dole's office. Most spoke of how their anguish about deserting the President was outweighed by the highway needs of their states; some cited the bill's provision raising the speed limit to 65 m.p.h. on rural interstates. Reagan restated his position that all he wanted was a clean bill, one stripped of the $890 million for 121 local "demonstration projects" that had fueled his charges of pork barrel. At that point Missouri Senator John Danforth revived the Symms bloc-vote proposal, and Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York said he was thinking of going along.

For a moment it looked as if Reagan might snare a dramatic last-minute victory. But then Senator Arlen Specter, a moderate, wielded his own veto. Specter, whose home state of Pennsylvania reaped one of the largest bonanzas from the demonstration projects ($78 million, including a sorely needed $45 million road improvement near Altoona), said he had too much at stake in the bill to give it all up. None of the 13 Republican defectors were willing to switch their votes and support the President unless all did; they remembered that G.O.P. Senator Slade Gorton of Washington lost his seat last fall after admitting he had traded his vote in a similar last-ditch situation to win White House support for a judicial appointment he favored. With Specter refusing to go along, the plan fell apart.

The drama of the final showdown was heightened by the fact that Reagan had won an initial Senate roll call the previous day. At the last minute of that tally, freshman Democratic Senator Terry Sanford of North Carolina broke party ranks and voted to sustain Reagan's veto. Majority Leader Robert Byrd, after some deft parliamentary maneuvering, forced a reconsideration of the vote. Then he went to work on the 69-year-old Sanford, a courtly former North Carolina Governor and president of Duke University. Within a few hours, confessing that he was "slightly confused" during the initial vote, Sanford executed an awkward pirouette.

Sanford's brief apostasy illustrates the pressures that can overwhelm a new legislator during the final moments of a climactic roll call. Picture the chaotic scene on the Senate floor: Sanford, who has not yet voted, is surrounded by a tight knot of Democrats demanding party loyalty. Sanford owes his seat to last year's Democratic tidal wave in the Senate, but he has promised state officials back home that he will vote to sustain the veto -- not because the bill is a bloated budget buster but because the overall funding formula does not provide enough for North Carolina. Like a commando operating behind enemy lines, Assistant Republican Leader Alan Simpson of Wyoming moves in for a word with Sanford. The Democrats literally try to elbow Simpson away. Simpson has just seconds to deliver his message to Sanford: "Five years from now, no one will remember how you voted on the highway bill. But they'll remember if you didn't keep your word." Simpson's warning had enough weight to sway Sanford's vote, at least for a day. But in his vacillation, Sanford left Senate Democrats with bitter memories that may also outlast the highway bill.

The pyrotechnics in the Senate left no time for any serious debate over the merits of the 121 demonstration projects at the heart of the struggle. The - $890 million cost of the projects amounts to barely 1% of the overall bill. But these individual road programs, each catering to the needs of specific congressional districts, symbolize the perennial difficulty in a representative democracy of defeating any spending measure that spreads its benefits across the political landscape.

The larger issue underlying the veto fight was serious: Should Congress have the right to mandate the construction and repair of individual roads and bridges? Almost all the money in the $88 billion, five-year authorization bill is passed on to the states according to complex allocation formulas. But legislators know that it is hard to take credit for such indirect funding in a 30-second campaign spot. So in 1982 Congress decided to build a few roads and add a few expressway exits on their own. Thus was born the demonstration project, a legislative fiction that claimed these congressional highways, byways, off-ramps and repair programs were merely scientific experiments to advance the art of roadbuilding.

Some of the purported "research" justifications for the demonstration projects in the current bill sound as if they were lifted from a Monty Python skit. Building a road and an access ramp from U.S. Route 219 to the Johnstown (Pa.) Flood National Memorial is described in circular fashion as "demonstrating methods of improving public access to a flood memorial." What is the construction of two parking lots on the Southwest Side of Chicago supposed to prove? According to the legislation, the lots will "demonstrate methods of facilitating the transfer of passengers between different modes of transportation." But each of these projects has a zealous congressional defender ready to hail it as a boon rather than a boondoggle. Democratic Congressman William Lipinski is the man behind the $3 million Chicago parking lots, which are designed to serve a rapid-transit line that will not be completed until 1992. "The lots tie directly with the mass-transit line," Lipinski says. "There's no pork here."

Even critics admit that many of the demonstration projects will alleviate serious local bottlenecks and spur economic development. Take the $53 million in federal funds to raise the height of the 136-ft.-tall Talmadge Memorial Bridge spanning the Savannah River. According to Georgia officials, the Port of Savannah has lost an estimated 1 million tons of shipping because modern container vessels cannot get under the existing bridge. "Something has to happen," says Robert Goethe, assistant director of the Georgia Ports Authority. "The ships are getting bigger, and the bridge is not getting taller."

But the question remains whether even the most laudable local programs need to be funded through explicit clauses in the highway bill. After all, the bill already gives states $81 billion in discretionary authority to use on eligible projects as they see fit. David Chapin of the Maryland department of transportation admits that his state had been planning to pay for three of its demonstration projects ($34 million) that were included in the bill. Skeptics might wonder in this case why Montana taxpayers should help Maryland residents foot the bill.

The $890 million in demonstration projects works out to just $2 million per congressional district spread over five years. Even though, to paraphrase the late Senator Everett Dirksen, a million here and a million there eventually add up to real money, that is a pretty meager sum alongside the public-works projects that used to be whooped through Congress in the days before the deficit doldrums. As Republican Congressman Jim Bunning of Kentucky cracked, "Calling this a pork-barrel bill is like calling a strip of bacon a luau."

The fuss over the pork-barrel issue masks a significant turnabout in the condition of the nation's highways. In 1982, the last time Congress passed a comprehensive highway bill, the debate was dominated by scare talk of decaying roads and crumbling bridges, complete with suggestions that the nation's transportation system would soon go the way of New York City's abandoned West Side Highway. Experts bandied around figures like $3 trillion for rebuilding America's decaying infrastructure. In truth, the Interstate Highway System was in trouble. Traffic had far outstripped the projections made when the system was initially planned in the 1950s. And the drive for fuel-efficient automobiles had inadvertently eroded the gasoline-tax revenues that pay for the Highway Trust Fund.

Congress responded by raising the gasoline tax by 5 cents per gal., with 1 cent earmarked for mass transit. Given the magnitude of the problem, it seemed the equivalent of pouring asphalt into a few potholes. But by almost every statistical measure, the quality of the nation's highways has improved somewhat. That is particularly true of the Interstate system, which carries 20% of the nation's traffic on only 1% of its road mileage. According to Federal Highway Administration figures, while only 30% of the pavement on urban Interstates was in good or very good condition in 1982, that figure had risen to 35% in 1985. "The rate of deterioration has been halted," says Joseph Rhodes, special assistant to the FHA administrator. "These conditions didn't arise overnight and they won't be corrected overnight."

Building highways will never be just another federal spending program. Few activities of government affect so many Americans daily, inspire such passion and profanity as those vast expanses of pavement stretching from horizon to horizon. That is why some White House aides believe Ronald Reagan was always doomed to lose last week's veto battle with the Senate. Was it the wrong war over the wrong issue at the wrong time? Wavering legislators, who once feared crossing the President, will not soon forget the day Reagan went hat in hand to the Senate needing one Republican vote and failed to get it. But it was also the highway bill that restored the fighting spirit the President will need in the coming Donnybrooks with Congress over the budget. As a senior Reagan aide put it, "We may have lost this, but goddammit, at least we're back in the game."

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Hays Gorey/Washington