PRESIDENT REMAINS DECIDEDLY PRO-BUSINESS

It was a classic stealth maneuver - and it worked. Two days after
Christmas, with President Bush at his Texas ranch and most of official
Washington on vacation, the White House announced the rejection of
regulations that would have barred companies which repeatedly violate
environmental and workplace standards from receiving government contracts.

Few in the press noticed, and those papers that printed anything about the
decision buried the stories on inside pages. But this was no trivial
matter. A congressional report had found that in one recent year, the
federal government had awarded $38 billion in contracts to at least 261
corporations operating unsafe or unhealthy work sites. The regulations Bush
killed were designed to stop that.

This is a classic example of the difference between the parties. These
particular rules were issued at the very end of the Clinton administration,
after being published in draft form 18 months earlier. Former Vice
President Al Gore had publicly promised organized labor he would see that
they were finished before he left that office.

Business opposed them, and Bush suspended them barely two months after he
moved in, finally killing them last week. The move was a companion to the
earlier 2001 action by the House and Senate, both then controlled by the
Republicans, in setting aside Clinton administration regulations on
ergonomics, designed to protect workers from repetitive motion injuries.
The Chamber of Commerce and similar groups led the fight to spike them, too.

When I wrote about that action last March, I erred in saying Congress could
have rewritten the rules that business found objectionable, instead of
killing the whole package. Business lawyers later convinced me that would
have been virtually impossible.

But when the ergonomics rules were killed, the administration promised that
new, "more reasonable" regulations would be forthcoming. A phone call to
the Labor Department last week elicited the information that no new
regulations have been issued and no one could say when they will be.

That is the game: Kill the rules you don't like quickly and quietly, then
take your sweet time writing new ones. Don't worry about how many strained
backs or stiff wrists people suffer in the meantime. And now, don't worry
if the companies that tolerate unsafe conditions are getting fat government
contracts at the same time.

Here's another example of why it makes a difference who is deciding how the
massive power of the executive branch is wielded - one I also wrote about
last year. Last Oct. 25, 30 agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration
raided the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center and shut down its
operations. The center had opened five years earlier, after California
voters approved a medical marijuana initiative. It served patients with
doctors' prescriptions to use marijuana to alleviate the pain and nausea
associated with AIDS, cancer and other diseases.

The raid was perfectly legal; the Supreme Court has affirmed that federal
anti-drug laws, which cover marijuana, pre-empt more permissive state laws
or initiatives. But no one has stepped forward to explain how busting up a
center operating with the full approval of the Los Angeles County sheriff
and local officials became a law enforcement priority for the federal
government barely six weeks after the terrorist attacks on this country.

Two months after the raid, no one has yet been charged with any crime by
the U.S. attorney's office. But the center remains inoperative, its former
patients forced to seek relief in the black market.

The White House complains constantly about Congress' irresponsibility -
sometimes with good reason. But often it is Congress that sets the
executive branch right. As I noted at the time, the Bush budget of last
April included a batch of fiscally cosmetic but phony law enforcement cuts,
including a wipeout of the $60 million grant to the Boys & Girls Clubs of
America for programs in public housing projects and high-crime areas,
strongly endorsed by local police. Congress restored almost all those cuts
and raised the clubhouse appropriation to $70 million.

Last year, Bush urged Congress to pass a bankruptcy bill that would make it
easier for credit card and auto loan companies to squeeze repayments out of
people. Bills similar to one Clinton had vetoed passed both the House and
Senate, but have been stuck in conference - in part because even the
lobbyists were embarrassed to be pushing them when so many small businesses
and individuals have been hammered by the recession and the aftershocks of
Sept. 11.

Believe me, if Bush had been able to rewrite bankruptcy rules with a stroke
of his pen, as he did with the contracting regulations, it would have
happened by now.

Elections do make a difference.