Whole Lott o' blamin' goin' on

Senate Republicans are angry that their leadership let Al Gore be a hero on guns.

By Jake Tapper

May 24, 1999 | Vice President Al Gore never thought that the Senate Republicans would actually give him the stage. Even as he was driven to Capitol Hill on Thursday just in case the Senate deadlocked on the gun-show loophole amendment and he was needed as a tie-breaker, neither he nor anyone on his staff thought that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., would ever allow him such a platform.

But Lott had allowed all sorts of things that few senators had anticipated. He let the Democrats plunge ahead with New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg's gun control amendment, for one. And then, in the wake of yet another school shooting in Georgia, six Republicans defected, and suddenly, there they all were, tied at 50-50. After weeks of exaggeratedly bad press about his year 2000 campaign team, Gore was all too happy to ride in on his white horse and cast the deciding vote in support of gun control.

The day's events, however, brought distress to House and Senate Republicans -- and anger directly targeted at Lott and his whip, Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla.

"Why in God's name did they let Al Gore break the vote?" one senior GOP source fumed. Noted a GOP House leadership aide: "Everybody's concerned and wondering what the big picture plan is here. While the House has an easier ability to control the proceedings on the floor, for the Senate to throw something like that on the floor and tell the members to have at it in this climate leads to great amount of consternation and wringing of hands."

A source in the Clinton-Gore administration was no less confused. "Folks at the White House were shocked and surprised that they gave us that opportunity," the source said. "There were lots of ways that they could have avoided it. When we discussed this after it was all over, the words 'legislative malpractice' were used a lot.

"Lott himself could have prevented Lautenberg's amendment from even coming to a vote," said the official. "He could have made a motion to reconsider, which is a procedural prerogative of the Leader that would have allowed him to bring it up at another time -- or never to bring it up at all. It's just a basic floor procedure, and it's not unusual in a close vote like that -- especially when votes are changing" as they were because of the events unfolding in Conyers, Ga. "But they didn't do it."

So why did Lott allow a vote on an issue that was a GOP loser, both politically and in more concrete voting terms? Did he not know that six Republican senators -- Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, Virginia Sen. John Warner, Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee, Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, and Ohio Sens. Mike DeWine and George Voinovich -- were going to defect? Lott and his communications team were unavailable for comment.

The administration source says that "it was clear that Lott hadn't talked to anybody" and didn't know that the vote would be 50-50, thus allowing the vice-president's grand entrance. "They were just unprepared; they were caught flat-footed."

A GOP House source lays the blame squarely at the feet of Nickles, supposedly the Senate majority whip, in charge of lining up the ducks on important votes -- though he's taken to calling himself the "assistant majority leader" instead. "Where was the whip in the Senate?" the senior GOP source asks, the comparison with the tough and effective House Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, remaining unstated. "This is the death of the whip in the Senate."

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, spoke against the Lautenberg amendment, arguing that it "creates more loopholes, will be more expensive, is going to increase taxes, and it will be more bureaucratic. I think it is going to push people into the streets to sell guns on the black market, which I think undermines everything he is trying to do."

Then Gore was whisked in, and he instructed the clerk to call the roll on Lautenberg's amendment. With one Democrat voting nay -- Montana Sen. Max Baucus -- and six Republicans defecting, the final count was 50-50. "On this vote," Gore intoned, "the yeas are 50, the nays are 50. The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative and the amendment is agreed to."

Bang! The gavel came down. A victory for the Democrats, a starring role for Gore.

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