Clinton’s Rivers Initiative:
Politicians Run Through It

By William Perry Pendley

(Editor’s note: William Pendley Perry is president and chief legal officer for Mountain States Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm specializing in issues of private property and individual liberty.)

President Bill Clinton has announced an American Heritage Rivers Initiative, under which he intends to designate 10 rivers annually as "American Heritage Rivers," appoint a federal overseer ("River Navigator") for each river, and provide increased federal funding to make the rivers "models of innovative economic and ecologically sustainable approaches to river restoration and protection."

The Clinton plan has elicited heated opposition from the West and rural America, from those who fear another layer of federal bureaucracy with authority to stifle economic activity and to restrict the use of private property.

Those fears are justified, especially considering the vague language of the Clinton plan and the fact that so much remains to be decided. Nor is there legal authority for the program. (The White House assertion that the purposes section of the National Environmental Policy Act compels action is absurd.) In addition, it is not the President but Congress that regulates navigable waters, and local government that oversees land use planning.

Lost in the controversy is something more fundamental: why? Given the haste with which Clinton moved on the River plan — he scuttled the Federal Register process to issue an executive order, rushing plans to name the first 10 rivers by the end of the year — there must be some urgency.

There is urgency: politics, and more specifically, Democratic political fortunes in the 1998 elections.

According to Resources Committee staff, the first three rivers most likely to be named include the Willamette in Oregon, the Yellowstone in Montana, and the Mississippi north of St. Louis. Each has tremendous political significance, especially if it is the recipient of a massive infusion of federal funds — diverted from other approved programs — delivered with great fanfare and Clinton's empathetic tender loving care.

For example, the Willamette River in Oregon borders both the First and Fifth Congressional Districts, held by Democrats who each won with a scant 52 percent of the vote. Moreover, after Oregon elected a conservative Republican U.S. senator, Democrats cannot afford to have Oregon's seven electoral votes go the way of the rest of the rock-solid Republican Rocky Mountain states.

Montana is increasingly Republican as a result of Clinton's War on the West; it went for Dole in 1996, elected a Republican to its at-large congressional seat, and nearly defeated a three-term Democratic senator, who won with 50 percent of the vote. The Yellowstone River is in Yellowstone County, a Republican stronghold, which must go Republican by a wide margin for Republicans to carry Montana. If the county margin is held to 2000, Democrats carry the state.

It is the Mississippi River, north of St. Louis, however, that holds the most potential for Democrats. The region is Clinton's greatest strength, with Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Kentucky, giving him 69 of the 270 electoral votes he needed in 1992 and 1996. Although Clinton lost some ground there in 1996, in the off-year elections of 1998, eight congressional seats will be in play, all along the Mississippi River.

Those seats (with the 1996 margin of victory) include: Democrats must hold onto Illinois' 17th (52 percent), Wisconsin's 3rd (52 percent), and Iowa's 3rd (49 percent), while trying to defeat Republicans in Minnesota's 1st (53 percent), Missouri's 9th (49 percent), Iowa's 1st (53 percent) and 2nd (53 percent), and Illinois' 20th (50 percent).

In all of these districts, the green of environmental group politics and the green of millions of federal dollars will make a potent political combination.

Similar political calculations are possible for the other seven rivers to be designated before the end of 1997, not to mention the other 20 to be named by the year 2000. The result could be a Democratic House in 1999 and a smaller Republican margin in the U.S. Senate.

But would President Clinton and his closest aides conspire with the Democratic National Committee to use an environmental initiative to influence the 1998 elections? Anyone who listened to U.S. Senator Thompson's hearings or heard U.S. Senator Bennett, R-Utah, discuss why Clinton declared the Utah Monument knows the answer: in a New York minute!