Liberals in the media have been quick to paint this tale as yet another story of the GOP and President Bush bending over for corporate America at the expense of the safety and the security of the American people. But throughout this debate the Democrats controlled the Senate. When the Senate reconvened after the summer recess, Corzine and Environment Committee Chairman Jim Jeffords -- the Vermont Independent whose defection from the GOP the previous year had made Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., majority leader -- asked Daschle and others in the leadership to attach the Corzine bill to the Homeland Security legislation.

But, the Senate staffer says, "leadership didn't help us." Throughout the debate over the Homeland Security bill, the Corzine bill was never permitted to be introduced.

Why is that? "There are some fairly influential Democrats here in the Senate who are doing the bidding of the chemical industry," specifically Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana, but also Sens. Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. "They put pressure on the leadership not to bring the bill up."

Breaux spokesman Brian Weiss says that his boss opposed the bill not because of all the oil refineries and chemical plants in Louisiana, but because "he was concerned about the security risks and he believed putting EPA in charge of the security was not the right thing to do." He have preferred that the Department of Homeland Security handle the sensitive information, Weiss says.

Corzine, however, tells Salon that when the bill came down to the wire, he was prepared to give on that issue and let the Department of Homeland Security supervise chemical plant security instead of the EPA.

The Senate staffer with knowledge of the bill also wonders about Daschle, a member of the Agriculture Committee who at that point was contemplating a presidential run. During his last reelection campaign, in 1998, Daschle was the No. 8 Senate recipient of agribusiness cash, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The chemicals used in agriculture are some of the most volatile, the staffer says, and "the ag lobby, they don't want to have to give any information to the EPA. They hate the EPA and don't trust them for anything. So this bill was something controversial within a constituency Tom Daschle cares about."

Daschle spokesman Jay Carson denies that his boss didn't want to see the Corzine bill become law. He blames its not being introduced as an amendment on technical Senate rules the Democrats needed to invoke in order "to stop the Republicans from filibustering the Homeland Security bill. And one of down sides was there were some very good proposals like this chemical security bill that didn't become a part of it." The Corzine bill is one of the 10 bills Daschle has introduced as part of the legislation he'd like to see passed this year, Carson notes.

That doesn't reassure Corzine, who is no longer on the Environment Committee and who seems to sense that his bill missed its chance, particularly with the GOP running the show again. At the end of the debate last year, "we were working with Senator Inhofe" -- then the ranking Republican on the Environment Committee -- "to address some of the issues people were most concerned about, and I was prepared to compromise on a number of them, including making Homeland Security the lead agency," instead of the EPA, Corzine recalls. "I was trying to reach out to get this passed any way I could. But there was a limitation on the number of amendments that would be offered and the leadership had queued up what they wanted to get to first. Then we came down to the last moments and there wasn't enough time. I was very disappointed."

Asked if he's frustrated with what he's seen, Corzine says, "'Frustration' is not the word so much as 'angry.'" Congress is "not willing to address this issue important to the safety of the communities we're elected to represent."

Does he think his bill has any chance of becoming law? "Quite honestly?" he asks. "No."

Asked if he supports the Corzine bill, Kuehne demurs. "A well-structured program could be beneficial," he says, "but we are concerned that a poorly conceived and hastily implemented program would have the opposite effect. This issue is too important to allow politics to dictate policy." McGloon now says that the ACC supports some sort of mandatory requirement for its companies. Why didn't it last year? Why did it work so hard to derail Corzine's bill, so that 18 months after Sept. 11 nothing has been done about the tremendous risk chemical plants pose for all of us? "Everybody talks about last year, but we're focused on this year," she says.

Then again, there were a lot of reasons the ACC would want to forget last year, including regular reports of poor security at their plants. Last Sept. 3, environmental activists Frank and Rosa Ferreira went to South Kearney and, wandering up and down the chain-link fence, videotaped the Kuehne plant for 20 minutes. No one approached them once. Two days later they did it again. Again, no one said boo. In July 2002, Richard Pienciak of the New York Daily News visited the Matheson Tri-Gas facility in East Rutherford, N.J., where a worst-case scenario would send 100,000 pounds of toxic hydrochloric acid gas into the area, killing 100,000. Pienciak found no apparent security -- and an open and unguarded fence. In April 2002, Carl Prine of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review remarkably sashayed into 30 chemical plants, warehouses and transport centers in Baltimore, Chicago and Houston.

Earlier this month, the ACC announced that it was launching a $50 million advertising and public relations campaign to improve its image.

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