Patricia Kilday Hart
Who is Joe Barton?
Is the Republican congressman who passed the new energy bill a partisan hack or a bipartisan compromiser? The answer is about as clear as the skies over his district.
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Environmentalists remain just as skeptical of Barton as he is of them. They’re critical, for instance, of a provision in the energy bill offering tax credits for oil and gas exploration, which Barton defends as merely “extensions of existing tax credits” (begging the question of whether the existing credits are a good idea, not to mention whether the oil companies need more incentives right now, with gas prices soaring and ExxonMobil posting a 32 percent increase in second-quarter earnings). At the same time, they aren’t exactly painting Barton as a villain. “He’s not just a windbag,” says Frank O’Donnell, the president of the environmental advocacy group Clean Air Watch. “He makes the system work to his advantage.”
For Barton, a Waco native and a loyal Aggie, it has been a long, slow journey to power—twenty years of amassing seniority and waiting his turn. After earning a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University, in Indiana, in 1973, he spent eight years working as a plant manager in Ennis. His entrée into national politics came in 1981, early in the Reagan administration, when he was named a White House Fellow and assigned to the Department of Energy. The next year he went to work for Atlantic Richfield. When Phil Gramm gave up his House seat in 1984 to run for the U.S. Senate, Barton was one of four Republicans to enter the primary. He took the runoff by ten votes and went on to win 57 percent in the general election. In photos from that era, he looks geeky, with dark hair, hollow cheeks, and big glasses, but today his face has filled out, his hair is gray, and he has the pallor of a man who has spent way too much time in meetings.
Like all Washington insiders, Barton excels at raising money. I saw the results on a blazing Saturday in August, at a town meeting in Corsicana, where about twenty people showed up. The crowd burst into applause when Barton announced that the Barton Family Foundation would contribute between $200,000 and $300,000 to the Boys and Girls Club in Corsicana. The foundation, it turns out, is a receptacle for special-interest cash, created by Barton because he has many more offers of financial help than he can legally channel into his campaign fund. Lobbyists literally beg to give him money. “When you chair the Energy and Commerce Committee, you’ve got lots and lots of industry groups [who] say, ‘What can we do?’” Barton explains. Campaign finance watchdogs like Craig McDonald, of Texans for Public Justice, regard this “nasty practice” as a way to move “soft” corporate money to powerful people, but it’s been blessed by both the IRS and the user-friendly House Ethics Committee and is an increasingly common congressional endeavor.
Despite the criticism of the energy bill, Barton shows no sign of controversy fatigue. This year, he plans to overhaul Medicaid—he wants to make it exclusively a program for the poor and recast nursing home care as a separate program—and he talks confidently of how the end product will look: “We will change the way we price and reimburse for prescription drugs. We will put in some co-payment requirements. We’ll do something about trying to reform the process for determining assets for senior citizens. We’re not going to throw Grandma out on the street, but we also don’t think Grandma should have a home in Highland Park and be on Medicaid.”
He also intends to revive some of his pet projects that didn’t make it into the new energy law. The shortage of gasoline following Hurricane Katrina provided Barton the opportunity to call again for drilling in Alaska and in coastal areas where it is now prohibited, as well as for construction of new refineries. Confirming the fear of Clean Air Watch’s O’Donnell that Katrina would give Barton an opening “to revive some of his bad old ideas,” Barton has already passed a bill through the House, strongly opposed by Dingell, that would hand over government regulation of refineries to the Department of Energy, which, unlike the Environmental Protection Agency, has no expertise in health and environmental issues.
Washington isn’t the only place where Barton’s environmental views have caused consternation. Back home, he earned the nickname Smoky Joe from environmentalists during a two-year battle over emissions from Ellis County’s cement plants. He intervened with the EPA to relax federal standards for pollution controls at the plants, whose owners, TXI and Holcim, are largely responsible for the $60,500 he has received from the cement industry since the 1998 election cycle, according to the Dallas Morning News. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to carve out Ellis County from the North Texas region that the EPA says is not in compliance with federal clean-air requirements. “He claimed faulty science,” says Wendi Hammond, the executive director of Dallas-based Blue Skies Alliance, who believes Barton has subordinated the air quality of his constituents to the financial interests of his leading campaign contributors.
In a reflective moment, Barton told me that his ideological tendencies softened after Republicans took the majority in Congress. “When you are in the minority, you can be totally pure,” he said. “If you know you are going to get beat, you can take a purist position on everything. When you become part of the majority, especially when you become a leader, a chairman in the majority, you have to govern.” Take the issue of protecting MTBE manufacturers from lawsuits. Here’s how Barton describes his thought process: “I weigh what’s the best policy. You always at least want to know what the best policy is. And then you want to see what’s the best politics you can make out of the best policy. If you think the best policy is acceptable politics, [you ask] ‘Do you want to put the muscle into making that happen?’” In the case of MTBE, Barton realized that what he wanted to do endangered the entire energy bill. “In my judgment,” he said, “that made it worth pulling back from the best policy.”
So who is the real Joe Barton, the ideologue or the pragmatist? The answer, of course, is that he is both—and that’s what makes him so effective, or so dangerous, depending on your point of view. Either way, you would be well advised to heed the words of his longtime adversary Hammond: “He’s not going to give up. He’ll use his position in any way he can.”
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