The $ 64,000 question among Washington conservatives right now is how Senate majority leader Trent Lott can emerge unscathed from a bubbling controversy over the chemical weapons treaty. The treaty is strongly opposed by Senate conservatives like Jesse Helms and Jon Kyl, but when they met with Lott last week and pressed him to publicly oppose it, he demurred. Lott also spent 45 minutes discussing the treaty with a group of conservative activists last week, but the meeting only confirmed that the majority leader sees the treaty more as a marker to use in bargaining with the White House than a matter of intrinsic importance. He spent most of the meeting in a defensive crouch and repeatedly referred to how much he had done last year to prevent the treaty’s passage. Lott is irritated over the pressure being placed on him by conservatives to oppose the treaty and has privately remarked, “I won’t be intimidated by Ed Feulner [president of the Heritage Foundation] and Paul Weyrich [president of the Free Congress Foundation].”
Lott already disappointed conservatives by caving in to Senate Democrats and pledging a vote would be held by April 29, the date the treaty goes into effect. But how he’ll achieve this remains to be seen. Helms is opposed to allowing the treaty out of the Foreign Relations Committee and has told colleagues that defeating the treaty is a defining issue for conservatives this year. Lott is hoping to get a unanimous-consent agreement to bring the treaty to the floor, arguing that he’s won agreement from the administration on most of the disputed provisions.
Yet the remaining unresolved issues are among the most important, and the administration nixed a deal that Lott proposed: He wanted the White House to allow a Senate debate and vote on the administration’s proposal to extend the ABM treaty to former Soviet states (also very unpopular with conservatives) in exchange for a Senate vote on chemical weapons. Since the White House said no to that, one alternative would be for Lott to allow the treaty to come to the floor while joining the fight against it. But that would only mollify his increasingly frustrated conservative colleagues if Lott joined the fight vigorously enough to produce 34 votes against the treaty — in which case the administration would pull out. Stay tuned.
