ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 5, 1996 TAG: 9604050046
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
NINTH District Congressman Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, made the Top 10 lists in two studies recently put together by the public-interest group Common Cause. He should be embarrassed.
The tobacco lobby, according to one of the studies, has distributed more than $20 million to congressional campaigns over the past 10 years. Of all members of Congress who received these gifts, Boucher's take - $73,350 - was sixth-highest. Among House members, his was fourth-highest.
Twenty million is considerably more than the National Rifle Association has given over the same 10 years, according to the other Common Cause study. But the NRA hasn't been stingy - and, here again, Boucher shows up among the top beneficiaries. In campaign gifts from the NRA's political action committee from 1986 through 1995, the congressman pulled in $41,600, third-highest in the House. What a distinction.
Boucher could cite plenty of arguments in his defense, and they aren't without merit. Accepting political-action committee gifts is perfectly legal; most members of Congress do it. To some extent, Boucher is merely representing his rural district - which includes tobacco growers and gun owners - when he votes favorably on cigarette and gun-rights legislation.
Certainly his record in Congress, in most other respects impressive, should be judged on more than these two issues. In return for a few, arguably symbolic votes, a smart, progressive congressman gets to stay in office. And nothing indicates he would have voted differently had the tobacco and gun lobbies been less generous.
Granting all that, Boucher still presumably knows that cigarette addiction kills more than 400,000 Americans a year, and that assault weapons aren't typically the guns of choice for sportsmen back home.
It was depressing to see the Abingdon lawyer, a member of the important House Commerce Committee, deny the need for committee hearings last month after former tobacco industry employees accused cigarette-makers of manipulating nicotine levels to keep smokers hooked. To the same committee - before Thomas Bliley, R-Richmond, became its chairman after the 1994 GOP takeover of the House - tobacco executives had earlier contradicted this allegation in sworn testimony.
In the wake of the new and highly damaging evidence, Boucher told the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "Having additional hearings would achieve little purpose and would only create another forum for political grandstanding" on matters involving an important industry for Virginia. That's sad.
Sad, too, it was to see Boucher vote last month to repeal a ban on assault weapons - a ban supported by 70 percent of Americans. The House vote was regarded, widely and rightly, as a political payoff to the NRA.
Of course, Boucher isn't alone in this hall of shame. Blessed with $123,976 in Big Tobacco political gifts over the past 10 years, Bliley has been the industry's No. 1 servant in Congress as well as its No. 1 recipient of campaign funds. L.F. Payne, the retiring Democratic congressman from Nelson County, has been in a position, as a member of the Ways and Means Committee, to influence cigarette-tax legislation. He, too, has taken in more tobacco money than Boucher: $92,899 over the past decade, according to the Common Cause report. And both Payne and Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, joined Boucher in voting to overturn the assault-weapons ban.
That he has company makes Boucher's obeisance to the tobacco and gun lobbies less egregious perhaps, but no less lamentable.
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