Diane Feinstein's forestry bill - 14 October 1994

Nothing, the man wrote, an apparently genial listener, years ago, nothing is deadlier than another country's politics. Bad enough, he wrote, knowing regular chess without having to learn the American form, in which the pawns move backwards, the bishops play no part and there's no king or queen. He's absolutely right.

But something happened last weekend in Washington on the last day of the life of this Congress, a plot and a scene that could have been dreamed up only by Alfred Hitchcock, the sort of thriller that never never happens in life but it did. Before I begin, I just ought to touch on Saddam Hussein's massive lunge toward Kuwait, which we thought had been repulsed and shattered once for all. The most interesting comment on his motive came from former General Schwarzkopf, the commander in chief of the desert war, he says, Saddam Hussein was counting on what the general calls the Carter factor, do as the North Koreans did and then General Cédras, scare the daylights out of the Americans, then have former President Carter intervene and make a seeming settlement on the villain's terms.

All right now, the passing into history in an ecstasy of melodrama of the 103rd Congress of the United States. A Congress usually simply dissolves ends whatever debates are left with are droned or a whine. Not this time.

I said last time that the California race for the one open Senate seat was a Hollywood script, more so last Saturday. Let me remind you of the rough scenario. The incumbent Senator Diane Feinstein is the San Francisco politician once mayor with a quarter century's experience of California problems that disturbed the nation: rotting inner cities, street crime, pervasive drugs, overpopulated schools, hundreds of thousands a year of illegal immigrants. She's been an active senator for a newcomer, sponsoring two of the three successful bills President Clinton got through the Senate. She's opposed by a Republican new to politics a bland affable innocent who is very very rich and is backed and fronted by a handsome battle-axe of a wife who knows where to raise the money and how to spend it cunningly on sound bites that rattle, on California television, like a kettle drum, all sounding the toxin of Mrs Feinstein as a down-the-line tax-and-spend Democrat who will soon bankrupt the state.

In the poll taken just as the Congress was about to rise and run, Mrs Feinstein was not even a percentage point ahead of the ineffable and in the flesh practically invisible Mr Huffington.

Since money seemed to be the magical element, Mrs Feinstein has sunk most of her own small fortune in this, thinking of mortgaging her San Francisco house to finance competing sound bites. What more could she do except keep on the boring business of debating the issues?

Well, now we dissolved to Washington and the last day of the Senate, which was ending in spasms of rancour and ill-will. The Republicans saying that the president never consulted them much but just showed up for photo-op bi-partisan occasions. I'm afraid there's much in that charge. And the Democrats saying that the Republicans when in doubt about a particular Clinton bill develop the habit of blocking it, so they could say in November, look how little he's done, and that too is nothing but the truth.

Well, the Senate had one or two final bits of business to finish off and one big bill. It approved letting the makers of dietary supplements sell their pills provided they don't advertise them as cures for anything… Now the big deal, which had appeared around noontime till we get another lumbering humiliating defeat for the administration, a bill to have the federal government take over the protection of six million acres of the southern California desert, a sweeping environmental claim that has not been equalled since Congress 14 years ago protected a vast expanse of Alaska.

Now this bill from the start was a time bomb, which many senators and Western power brokers were determined to dismantle. They thought first of development, the desert you know is extremely fertile – one of the oldest Western maxims is spit on the desert and a flower pops up. But the main public argument of the opposing senators was that the bill would cost the National Park Service and by quick extension the taxpayer a fortune to carry out. The lobbying for and against this bill has been going on for months, the House shirked it to the day before it broke up, but at two in the morning it was passed. Now it went to the Senate.

And who do you suppose invented, wrote, proposed and introduced this bill, none other than the beautiful Diane Feinstein and she had clawed and insinuated her way through the rival lobbies to bring this bill to the floor at last. But no sooner was it there, then it ran smack into the Senate's great roadblock, a filibuster.

Twenty-seven times in this Congress, the Republicans have filibustered bills into oblivion, it's a device that's impossible in the House practically, which can close debate with little objection from the floor, but the Senate has jealously preserved throughout this century its right to what is called unlimited debate. The original idea was sensible even noble allowing free and unfettered public debate would guarantee that in serious matters no majority could ever trample on the minority.

However, the way a filibuster is used most of the time is to prolong debate on and on through the days and nights must be continuous and eventually bore an paralysed the chamber beyond its term of life.

Debate by the way is a fancy word for any continuous speechifying on any topic that comes to mind. Senators have been known to read slowly and stubbornly through the books of the Old Testament. The late and long unlamented Huey Long, I remember, recited an interminable tribute to his dead mother and expounded at loving length her recipe for frying oysters. This time, as the day and the life of the Senate waned, one Senator Wallop of Wyoming, I kid you not, Senator Wallop ordered to have the bill read aloud solemnly articulately all 61 pages of it. The bill appeared doomed for, to Mrs Feinstein, a heartbreaking reason. The only way a filibuster can be killed off is to find 60 Senators who will vote to end debate.

Mrs Feinstein, buoyed up by the support of possibly a dozen Republicans who broke ranks to support her, saw the day before the possibility that the bill might pass, but the senators were already on the way to the airport or in the air or already home. In 24 hours she was on the phone and the fax begging them to wing their way back and vote.

By the time Senator Wallop was getting his second wind, Mrs Feinstein had done a hopeful count of 59 Senators likely to vote with her. Obviously, there were others unreachable or unknowable, but who and where was the 60th vote? Mrs Feinstein knew very well who it was, she was Senator Moseley Braun from Illinois a freshman Senator, the first black woman ever elected to the United States Senate – isn't that perfect Warner Brothers casting? She could save the bill and the Democrats and the heroic initiative of Senator Feinstein who by now could stay put no longer, she was pacing up and down and around jabbing glances at her watch. The Senate majority leader Senator Mitchell was trying to balance three phones and talking to two.

Senator Moseley Braun had promised to be there, where could she be? One senator was flown back from Tennessee, another from Arizona, one from Nebraska, another from New Jersey, a precious Republican from Delaware. The majority leader had the wit just in time to realise that one trusty democratic vote was that of Senator Lieberman from Connecticut an Orthodox Jew who would not have of course be able to travel by train or car between Fridays sundown and Saturdays sundown, they got him into a Washington hotel on Friday so that come Saturday he could walk to the capital. But where oh where was Senator Moseley Braun?

She was imprisoned in a manner of speaking, she'd gone down into her garage, the door closed behind her and her electronic beeper failed she was locked in there. And – in accordance with any script approved by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges or Hitchcock – there was no telephone.

We can only leave to your imagination and the nightmare fantasies of Mrs Feinstein, how the gallant Carol Moseley Braun got out, but she did. She broke out of the place fuming and trembling, hailed a cab, rushed up the Capitol steps, raced to a breaking wave of Democratic applause into the chamber.

Senator Feinstein had her 60 votes. Senator Wallop was foiled and gave up. A senator from Louisiana whose been on the Natural Resources Committee for 22 years said about Diane Feinstein, wheeling and plunging and holding on, it is the most remarkable one-man, one-woman, one-senator show I have ever seen. The bill was passed and the six million acres are preserved. President Clinton can claim one truly major piece of legislation that came out of the sorrowful 103rd Congress in its death rattle. Whether Diane Feinstein's heroic one-woman show can off-set the golden clanking of Mr Huffington's millions is something that would have of course certainly happen in a movie but in life we shan't know until the morning of Wednesday 9 November, a date that may come to live in history or infamy.

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