After all the fireworks, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty took a drubbing. Fifty-one senators voted against it, 17 more than were needed to block ratification. Yet up until the very eve of the vote, a high-stakes struggle for the heart of Trent Lott was going on behind the scenes. The majority leader had to choose between holding a vote on ratification and delaying it. His intentions were unclear as late as Wednesday afternoon, when the president called to plead for postponement. That Lott told the president, in so many words, to buzz off was due primarily to the persistence of a small band of conservative Republicans, but also to the arrogance of Senate Democrats and the Clinton administration and the last-minute legal advice of a Washington lawyer.
The backdrop to last week’s drama is as follows: President Clinton signed the CTBT, which obliges signatories to permanently forsake all nuclear testing, in September 1996 and submitted the treaty to the Senate a year later. It was immediately referred to the Foreign Relations Committee, where it languished with no hope of going anywhere. Committee chairman Jesse Helms promised not to move on it until the president also submitted the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto environmental protocol for ratification — something Clinton showed no intention of doing.
A prolonged stalemate ensued, but it drew little notice outside foreign-policy circles. Indeed, the stalemate might persist to this day but for the spadework of a few Republican senators — Jon Kyl in particular — who were committed either to ensuring the treaty remained bottled up in committee or to killing it outright.
The impetus for action came in April, when Kyl learned the Clinton administration had arranged for an international conference on the future of the treaty, scheduled for September, to be held in New York. This suggested to Kyl the administration would use the conference to mount a massive campaign in favor of ratifying the CTBT. More important, it suggested that for such a campaign to be defeated, he needed to start organizing senators who might oppose the treaty.
Soon thereafter, Kyl drafted Paul Coverdell, an energetic Republican senator and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, to join his crusade. Their first meeting, in May, was with Lott and Helms, both of whom indicated their support for finding a way to kill the treaty or keep it buried in committee. Kyl and Coverdell promptly began meeting with other Republican senators to gauge their opinions on the treaty; a month later they were pleasantly surprised to discover as many as 30 were already opposed. Equally important, all but one of the 17 GOP senators up for reelection next year indicated they’d be happy to see the treaty defeated in 1999 (Jim Jeffords, a Vermont liberal, was the lone holdout), in hopes of preventing it from becoming a political hot potato during their campaigns. When Kyl and Coverdell shared their intelligence with Lott, he indicated for the first time that he might be willing to bring the treaty up for a vote later in the year.
This encouraged the dynamic duo to intensify their efforts during the August recess. They compiled briefing books for Republican senators containing countless articles and memos making the case against the treaty and began recruiting former government officials who could speak to the treaty’s many shortcomings. They also brought in two of their conservative colleagues — senators Tim Hutchinson and Jeff Sessions — to expand their advocacy efforts.
Shortly after the senators returned to Washington in September, Kyl, Coverdell, Lott, and Helms met to plot strategy. Lott had just been informed there were now 34 “no” votes, enough to block ratification of the CTBT. But he and Helms opposed bringing the treaty up for debate until there were 40 hard votes against it. Helms in particular pointed out that some opponents were sure to weaken under pressure from the White House, just as they did during the 1997 debate over a chemical-weapons treaty.
Two developments around this time proved crucial in the effort to defeat the treaty. First, Senate Democrats escalated their criticism of Republicans for refusing to release the CTBT for a vote. On July 20 every Democratic senator had signed a letter urging a vote by September. Then on September 8, in a now infamous statement, Byron Dorgan vowed “to plant myself on the floor like a potted plant” and disrupt Senate business if the Republicans refused to schedule debate and a vote on the treaty. Republicans could barely contain their glee over attacks like these, as they suggested Democrats still hadn’t realized the extent of the GOP’s mobilization against the treaty.
The second development was the success of the Kyl/Coverdell education campaign. Throughout September the two complemented their own canvassing of Senate Republicans with a series of briefings by outside experts. Two former senior officials of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, now retired, flew in from Hawaii, for example, to speak with senators about the treaty and answer their questions.
Even more valuable was James Schlesinger, whose previous posts include director of the CIA, secretary of defense, secretary of energy, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. In a low-key presentation at a September 21 lunch for Republican senators, Schlesinger spelled out the flaws in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Some cite this as the turning point in bringing wavering Republicans around to opposing the treaty.
Schlesinger later conducted briefings for small groups of senators, and when Susan Collins, a Maine moderate, wavered, he initiated a private meeting with her. Their 30-minute session helped cement her opposition. Even Lott later acknowledged, “James Schlesinger was the one that had the greatest impact on me.”
It’s no coincidence that by the end of September, when Kyl, Coverdell, Helms, and Lott met again to evaluate their strategy, 44 Senate Republicans had made solid commitments to vote against the treaty. This prompted Helms to say he would let the treaty out of the Foreign Relations Committee, confident it could be defeated in the full Senate. The lingering question was whether Democrats remained sufficiently clueless about the GOP strategy to keep agitating for a vote.
The answer came quickly. On September 29, senator Joseph Biden told Helms of his plan to offer an amendment to the Labor-HHS appropriations bill with a resolution pledging the Foreign Relations Committee to hearings on the treaty, and pledging the majority leader to schedule debate and a vote on the Senate floor. Lott mischievously called Biden’s bluff, saying there was no need for an amendment; he’d be happy to schedule 10 hours of debate on the treaty, then a vote. Kyl and other Republicans thought Democrats would get suspicious at this point, but the only substantive change requested by minority leader Tom Daschle was more time for consideration of the treaty. Lott promptly offered 22 hours, and by October 1 a unanimous consent agreement had passed the Senate, committing the treaty to a vote once the 22 hours had elapsed.
Just why the Democrats fell into the GOP trap of agreeing to a vote is debated in Republican circles. Some believe it was because Daschle, Biden, and the administration still didn’t know Republicans had ginned up enough opposition to the treaty to kill it. (If true, this would rank as one of the more extraordinary boners in recent Senate history.) Another theory, advanced by GOP senator Slade Gorton, is that Democrats had concluded they could persuade enough Republicans to vote for the treaty or force a delay if it were headed for defeat. Daschle confirmed that this was part of the Democratic strategy: “We made the assessment . . . that there would be open-minded Republicans willing to work with us to come up with the necessary revisions.” Given the flexibility of Lott and others during debate on the chemical-weapons treaty, this was not an unreasonable expectation, though Daschle also conceded that “there are a lot of people who hold responsibility [for the defeat] and I take my share.”
Yet it quickly became obvious the Democrats had been outmaneuvered. The administration initially tried schmoozing a few undecided Republican senators by inviting them to dinner with Clinton at the White House, but the president was brooding, and the evening was a disaster (Clinton slammed the table at one point, complaining, “Trent Lott has me by the short hairs”). Next was a brief war-room offensive, but Republicans were ready with responses. The White House, for example, began trumpeting that 32 Nobel laureates had endorsed ratifying the treaty. Kyl responded with a letter signed by six former defense secretaries opposing ratification. When William Cohen, secretary of defense, held a press conference on the importance of supporting the treaty, Helms went to the Senate floor and quoted from Cohen’s statements as a senator opposing a ban on nuclear testing. The ultimate blow came on October 7, when Richard Lugar, the administration’s most consistent Republican ally on foreign policy, announced his opposition to the treaty. This, according to Gorton, was “fatal.”
Lugar’s announcement convinced the administration and Senate Democrats there was no hope of securing enough votes to ratify the treaty, at which point they wisely modified their message. From that point forward, they stressed the danger to the “international community” in rejecting the treaty and the need to postpone the vote. Before long, 62 senators, many of them Republican opponents of the treaty, had signed a letter endorsing this general idea. Lott was clearly intrigued, and did nothing to discourage Republicans like John Warner from calling for delay.
So what prevented Lott from making a last-minute deal? Democrats objected to the central GOP demand in exchange for postponing the vote, i.e. that the Senate not reconsider the treaty before 2001 (Republicans fear Democrats will push for a vote on the eve of next year’s elections). Daschle made a last-ditch effort on October 12, writing to Lott that there would be no attempt to schedule a vote this year or next “absent unforeseen changes in the international situation.” But even moderate Republican senators ridiculed this exception — “absurd,” Gorton told me — and it went nowhere.
Another obstacle to agreement also emerged on October 12, when Kyl began circulating information he’d been given by Doug Feith, a Washington lawyer and senior Reagan Pentagon official. The gist of the matter was that signatories of the CTBT are obligated not to conduct nuclear tests undercutting the object of the treaty even if they have not ratified it (Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties). This suggested that postponing the vote was a backdoor way of implementing the treaty. Kyl also circulated a brief written in 1996 by John Holum, a senior arms-control official in the Clinton administration, affirming the point.
The final obstacle to a deal was the conservatives’ resolve. They’d signaled to Lott their opposition to postponing the vote, but the key episode came late on the evening of October 12. Lott met with Kyl, Coverdell, and Helms to discuss some conversations he’d been having with Daschle, but the senators made it clear they wouldn’t support a deal along the lines Daschle was proposing. Later, Jim Inhofe, a Republican critic of the treaty, arrived at the meeting and upped the ante, telling Lott he would use his power to block any effort to postpone the vote. Lott came away from the meeting resigned to holding a vote. It didn’t hurt that Dick Cheney, secretary of defense in the Bush administration, called Lott the next day from Canada and urged him to kill the treaty.
Yet even after the vote, Republican senators and their staffs emphasized to me how amazed they were at the ham-handedness of Clinton officials through the entire process. Coverdell, among others, noted that had the president called Lott a week before the vote, instead of two hours before, it might have been possible to cut a deal. Yet rather than extend an olive branch, Clinton devoted much of his October 8 press conference in Ottawa to repeatedly charging the Republicans with politicizing the treaty vote (moments after Clinton made these comments, they were distributed to Lott and other wavering Republicans). Symbolic of the administration’s poor handling of its lobbying effort was that on October 13, the day of the Senate vote, Cohen and secretary of state Madeleine Albright were not even in Washington, choosing instead to make a joint appearance at the University of Maine.
These mistakes notwithstanding, Kyl, Coverdell, Helms, and Lott achieved something no one would have predicted a few months ago. It’s all the more remarkable in that Republicans have had few such triumphs since winning their congressional majorities in 1994. Defeating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty may, of course, prove to be an isolated victory. A day after the vote there were already signs of GOP queasiness. Still, a beaming Lott seemed to speak for many of his fellow Republicans when he said, “We did the right thing for our country, and I’m very proud of it.”
Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
