Marathon man: Henry Waxman's climate change bill won't make it into law this year. That's why he's the right guy for the job.

• Author: Homans, Charles
• Position: Cover story

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's a drizzly spring evening on Capitol Hill, and an Indiana congressman has placed himself in an unenviable spot: between Representative Henry A. Waxman and the tobacco industry.

At issue tonight on the floor of the House of Representatives is a piece of legislation that Waxman, a Democrat from California, has been pursuing, Ahab-like, for a decade and a half: a bill that would place cigarettes under the regulatory authority of the Food and Drug Administration. Waxman's opponent, Republican Steve Buyer, is on the floor pressing for a more industry-friendly alternative: the creation of a new agency called the Tobacco Harm Reduction

Center, which would encourage smokers to begin quitting by moving from cigarettes to, say, smokeless tobacco. "You see," Buyer explains, "it is not the nicotine that is killing people--it's the smoke! It's the smoke! It's the smoke that's killing people." Someone coughs in the back of the room. Buyer doesn't miss a beat. "I heard somebody coughing," he says. "It's the smoke! I'm telling you."

Waxman, a former smoker himself, is unfazed. He has been fighting the tobacco wars since Buyer was in law school. His bill is the end point of years of machinations aimed at battering the tobacco industry's credibility and clout, piece by piece. It was Waxman who, in 1994, hauled seven tobacco-company CEOs before his subcommittee to testify that they did not believe nicotine to be addictive. (Their company scientists, who testified later, said otherwise.) And it was Waxman and his investigators who extracted damning internal documents, one after another, from R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, showing that cigarette manufacturers had knowingly concealed the hazards of what they were selling, documents that set the stage for the multibillion-dollar judgments the companies were forced to pay out a decade ago.

"This Buyer substitute is deeply flawed," Waxman says when it is his turn to speak. "It represents an inadequate response to the greatest preventable cause of disease and death in the United States." He rattles off the names of some of the organizations that support his own legislation: the American Heart and Lung Associations, the American Cancer Society, and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, among others. Buyer's amendment is whisked off the House floor to make way for (oh, the indignities of life in the minority) a resolution from a Bronx Democrat "congratulating the on-premise sign industry for its contributions to the success of small business." When a roll call is finally taken the next morning, Congress votes for Waxman's bill, Tobacco Harm Reduction Center not included, by a margin of nearly three to one. The Washington Post runs the story on page A2. What would've been unbelievable fifteen years ago seems unremarkable now.

Waxman's major accomplishments are often like this. His legislative campaigns unfold over spans of time beyond the patience of most lawmakers, and sometimes defy political gravity--in the 1980s, when anything smacking of Great Society liberalism was on the chopping block, Waxman managed to expand the Medicaid program twenty-four times. It is not unusual for him to spend a decade or longer advancing a single policy goal in tiny pieces, forging unusual alliances as he needs them, or simply outlasting his opponents. "It's the Ho Chi Minh approach," a despairing Republican staffer on Waxman's committee once told National Review. "If [victory's] not in the first year, it's in the fifth."

This year, at age sixty-nine, Waxman has the wind fully at his back for the first time since his early days in Congress a third of a century ago. In November, he won a secret-ballot election for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, narrowly unseating Michigan Representative John Dingell, the eighty-two-year-old lion of the House who had held the post in every Democratic Congress since 1981. It is traditionally the third most powerful position in the House--during Dingell's tenure, 40 percent of House bills crossed his desk--and, with Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel hamstrung by a real estate scandal, it is now arguably second only in policymaking influence to Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Waxman is also exceptionally well wired to the executive branch. Philip Schiliro, who served as Waxman's chief of staff and virtual alter ego for more than twenty years, is now President Obama's congressional liaison, the aide most directly in charge of shepherding the president's agenda through Congress. Obama has also tapped former Waxman staffers for important deputy-level positions at the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as lower-ranking jobs elsewhere. This is no small thing: lawmakers and presidents alike struggle to get actionable intelligence from inside federal agencies, which in turn zealously guard it to preserve a measure of autonomy. Vice President Dick Cheney made himself immensely powerful in part by placing loyalists in key positions throughout the bureaucracy. Waxman's ears are closer to the ground than those of just about anyone else in Congress.

For the rest of this year, Waxman's agenda includes launching most of the Democrats' biggest-ticket policy items. He is one of three chairmen crafting a health care reform bill this summer. If that effort is ambitious, the project consuming his time between now and then is even more so: along with his lieutenant, Heath and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Waxman is the principal architect of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the first serious attempt by Congress to tackle climate change. Drafts of the bill include everything from money for electric cars to new requirements for lightbulb...