Why Rep. Peter DeFazio keeps coming back for more

The Oregonian
By David Sarasohn
April 1, 2014

In the last congressional recess, when Peter DeFazio carried a 55-pound backpack through the Grand Canyon, attaining the serenity of being part of an overwhelming natural universe took him a week.

“It’s a life-changing experience,” recalled the congressman from Springfield about his trip. “For seven days, I didn’t think about much but the beauty of the Grand Canyon. It makes you feel pretty inspired.”

These days, life on Capitol Hill can make it a lot harder to feel inspired.

DeFazio, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, returned to find the House moving to repeal the Antiquities Act, used by just about every president since Theodore Roosevelt to set aside special pieces of land from development. The House, in a basically party-line vote, passed a bill to require congressional approval for decisions such as Bill Clinton protecting the Grand Staircase-Escalante area in Utah.

Not, of course, that such a bill is ever likely to become law, the chances it being passed by the Senate and signed by the president being about the same as the chances of a squirrel jumping across the Grand Canyon.

“It’s very frustrating,” says DeFazio. “The country has a lot of problems, and we spend a lot of time on this pretend legislation, intended to appeal to a small part of (the Republican) base.”

But after the episode, “I still retained my somewhat mellow demeanor, somewhat eroded, from the Grand Canyon trip.”

Then the resources committee issued multiple subpoenas to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wanting to know why it wasn’t pursuing as many cases of wind projects injuring wildlife as oil and gas projects. (The reason, says DeFazio, is that there are a lot more oil and gas projects, and they’ve been around a lot longer.)

“Basically, they are harassing the Department of the Interior to prevent it doing anything useful,” he concludes.

“That’s the part that pretty much pushed me back from my relaxed state.”
For DeFazio, of course, “mellow” and “relaxed” will always be relative terms. But these days, lots of other House members, from both parties, are finding the environment considerably more stressful than going down and back up the Grand Canyon, and are taking a different kind of hike.

At a time when Congress is making less law than any time in history, more than 40 House members have decided they have something better to do next year. And they’re not all frustrated minority members, although three of the five most senior Democrats are leaving.

Of the Republicans, Doc Hastings of Washington, chairman of the resources committee, is departing, and last week Mike Rogers of Michigan, chairman of the House intelligence committee and standby of the Sunday talk shows, announced that he’d rather try broadcasting. Monday, Dave Camp of Michigan, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, announced he was pulling the ripcord.

Yet DeFazio, for whom “patient” is not the first word that comes to anyone’s mind, is running for his 15th term, which could make him the 15th most senior member in a dysfunctional 435-member House.

Even with the mellowing memories of the Grand Canyon driven from his mindset, he firmly maintains it’s worth it.

“You can’t give up,” he insists. “Every so often something good happens.”

He was able to get some money in the Water Resources Development Act for dredging the Southwest Oregon ports of his 4th District. He’s combined with House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia to write and pass a bill to give high-tech companies some protection against frivolous lawsuits on patent infringements, although the Senate has yet to take it up.

And the Highway Trust Fund, which DeFazio has been warning for years is going to run out of money, is about to run out of money. He has specific proposals to deal with it, none of which seem likely to draw the interest of the House Republican leadership, but he’s certain that the federal government is not going to go out of the transportation business.

“Things have to happen,” DeFazio says, “and I want to shape it.”

Meanwhile, he persists in a House that can seem calcified on a good day, where the leadership refuses to consider the painfully negotiated bipartisan Senate deal to extend unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless.

“Nobody at the country club complains about lack of unemployment benefits,” explains DeFazio. “It’s maddening, and it’s cruel.”

And it can seem a very long way from the Grand Canyon.