May 19, 1999

Acrobatic Gorton flips on mine vote

It's called trying to have your cake and eat it too.

In a characteristic hair-splitting act, Sen. Slade Gorton of Washington voted against his own legislation permitting the Crown Jewel Mine in Okanogan County.

This incident dramatically illustrates why it can be misleading to depend only on the voting record of our elected representatives.

Gorton first infuriated opponents of the proposed gold mine by inserting a provision to allow the project into the spending bill funding the military campaign in the Balkans. The bill also provides humanitarian relief for Balkan refugees and Honduran hurricane victims.

Critics castigated Gorton for callously capitalizing on humanitarian efforts to stop ethnic cleansing in order to further the economic interest of the mining industry.

We agreed with those critics because Gorton's amendment overturns a provision of the 1872 Mining Law that forbids using more than five acres of public land to dump waste materials from mining operations. Crown Jewel cannot fit all of its cyanide-leached wastes into five acres, so the federal government rightly invoked the mining law to refuse a permit to the mine.

The mining act needs reforms that are subject to full and fair debate. But to change the act in this fashion was both inappropriate and irresponsible.

When the final vote was taken on the spending package on the floor, Gorton voted no - even though his vote, in effect, negated his support for the mine.

"I have opposed the war from the beginning and will not support it now," he said, acknowledging that Kosovo, not the mine, was what mattered most.

Gorton rightly counted on the urgency of the Kosovo crisis to cause members of the Congress, many of whom vociferously opposed his amendment, to acquiesce.

So now citizen who read the record will see this: Gorton, who was its prime supporter, voted against the Crown Jewel Mine. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who opposed the mine, is recorded as voting for it because she favors using the military to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

By voting against the gold mine he champions, Gorton did make one thing crystal clear. His critics were right all along: his amendment didn't belong in the spending bill.