Richard Gephardt`s poor showing in last Tuesday`s primaries has also weakened the Missouri congressman`s prime piece of legislation: the Gephardt amendment to the huge trade bill.
Even before Super Tuesday, Gephardt`s amendment, which would require economic retaliation against countries that have huge trade surpluses with the United States, was widely perceived as unlikely to survive the legislative process.
Removal of the amendment would make the trade bill, now before a House-Senate conference committee, easier to pass and to win President Reagan`s signature, although there are many other issues that could stand in the way.
”After Super Tuesday and Gephardt`s poor showing, there is naturally all kinds of speculation . . . as to just where we go,” said Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Ways and Means Committee and is a Gephardt supporter. Rostenkowski is leading the House conferees on the trade bill.
”There is no intention on my part to delay activity. There is a lot of speculation about what can happen in Michigan,” Rostenkowski said, referring to the Democratic caucuses there on March 26. ”That has nothing to do with the time frame in which I am going to negotiate the trade bill.”
According to members of Congress and aides involved with the bill, Gephardt`s inability to win any state but his own in last Tuesday`s binge of primaries and caucuses crippled the amendment.
”This does not help prospects for the Gephardt amendment,” said Democratic political analyst Kirk O`Donnell. ”But the Gephardt amendment was only a means to an end anyway.”
Gephardt would probably disagree. He has been criss-crossing the country promoting his amendment, which the House approved last April by a 4-vote margin.
The House and Senate approved separate trade bills, and a large group of senators and representatives is working to resolve the differences. Both bills attempt to address the problem of the huge U.S. trade deficit, but with widely differing methods.
Negotiators have made considerable progress, although many tough issues remain, including the Gephardt provision. The Democratic leadership in the House has predicted that the bill will be completed by April 1, but others say that is more optimistic than realistic.
Gephardt built his presidential campaign on the trade issue, and it seemed to play well in Iowa, where he won, and in New Hampshire, where he finished a respectable second.
But he got buried in the South, which should be fertile ground for trade concerns because of its failing textile industry, much of which has been lost to foreign companies. Gephardt supporters say his poor showing had more to do with a lack of money with which to deliver his message than with the message itself.
Rostenkowski said he plans to meet with Gephardt on Wednesday, and by then he should have a proposal from the Senate on trade retaliation provisions. The Senate negotiators, led by Lloyd Bentsen (D., Tex.), are preparing to offer a modified version of the provision in the Senate trade bill. That provision calls for negotiations with offending countries, to be followed by a modest amount of retaliation if those talks fail.
”My guess is that it will be pretty much as is,” said a Senate staff member working on the trade retaliation offer. ”Then we will wait to see if the House is willing to put a little more work into it.”
Rep. Donald Pease (D., Ohio), who has been instrumental in formulating trade legislation, at first said Gephardt`s showing in the presidential campaign would make little difference in the negotiations. But then he added, ”If he had won big, it might have caused us to make the language stronger.”
President Reagan has consistently rejected the Gephardt approach, but he is not in favor of the Senate`s alternative, which, though not so tough, would still limit presidential authority.
The President`s trade representative, Clayton Yeutter, said immediately after Super Tuesday that Gephardt`s performance would make it easier to compromise away his trade provision, which, in turn, should make it easier to mold the trade bill into a form Reagan can accept.
However, Yeutter warned that the process still has a long way to go. Such phraseology by the administration irritates some congressional trade leaders, who view it as detrimental to the compromise process.
Rostenkowski said he had heard suggestions from the administration that the trade bill might be dead. That is not true, he said. In fact, there is a lot of enthusiasm in Congress on the issue, especially among Democrats.
In the larger political arena, Rostenkowski said, it is a mistake for the White House and Republicans to abandon the issue.
”I don`t think (Vice President George) Bush, as a candidate, can ignore it. Dick Gephardt made his biggest impression when he talked about the Hyundai,” he said.
Rostenkowski was referring to a Gephardt campaign ad in which he charged that a Hyundai automobile would cost $48,000 here if the U.S. put as many tariffs on the South Korean car as South Korea does on American imports.
Rep. Sam Gibbons (D., Fla.), chairman of a House subcommittee on trade, predicted that Congress would pass a trade bill that would be supported by Reagan. But, he said, ”I never thought trade was a good political issue. It`s too complicated, and it`s too hot.”
By ”too hot,” Gibbons said he meant there are too many sides to the issue, and people get caught up in very parochial parts of it, such as which company sells more of what overseas.
Nearly 200 members of Congress, working in 17 mini-conferences, are trying to hammer out compromise legislation to deal with the trade deficit and open international markets to U.S. products.
Significant progress has been made, especially by the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, in removing extraneous provisions from the bill. Rostenkowski offered, and the Senate agreed, to remove such things as a sanction against repeat violators of customs laws and a provision that would have transferred to the U.S. trade representative some authority of the President to determine customs preferences for certain nations.
Major obstacles remain, however, including proposed restrictions on foreign investments in the U.S.; a ban on importing Toshiba products because a subsidiary of the Japanese firm sold sensitive equipment to Soviet bloc countries; changes in U.S. export control laws; and a requirement that companies inform their employees well in advance of anticipated plant closings.
The plant-closing provision and the Gephardt amendment have been strongly supported by organized labor. But in the wake of Super Tuesday, several labor officials were quoted as saying the Gephardt provision was dead and that the United Auto Workers would probably not support Gephardt strongly in the Michigan caucuses.
Following that report in the Washington Post, the AFL-CIO put out a statement saying the organization ”strongly disagrees” with the stated impact of the primaries on the trade legislation. However, a labor official, who asked to remain anonymous, said the group still hopes to get ”as much of the Gephardt amendment as possible” into the final legislation.
