The man who is supposed to be probing the influence of campaign contributions is under scrutiny himself.
Environmental groups are watching Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Com-mit-tee is leading the campaign finance probe, to see if he will be influenced by his hefty contributions from industry groups when the committee considers a regulatory reform bill.The groups fear regulatory reform will be used to overturn proposals for stricter emissions con-trols as well as provide companies an opportunity to block or delay future environmental regulations.
Recently, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Working Group, an environmental coalition group, ranked Thompson seventh among all senators in his receipt of contributions since 1990 from "polluter" political action committees, with more than $536,000 in receipts. (Thompson ran in both 1994 for the last two years of Vice President Gore's Tennessee Senate term and in 1996 for a full term.).
The groups identified "Polluter PACs" as those that joined industry coalitions to lobby for proposals to weaken the Clean Air Act or the failed Republican regulatory reform bill in the last Congress.
Thompson's top five "polluter PACs" and their contributions over the two campaigns were identified as BellSouth, $20,500; Federal Express Corp., $19,000; the National Association of Realtors, $17,500; Eastman Chemical Co., $16,000 and Chevron Corp., $14,000.
Daniel Weiss, political director for the Sierra Club, also noted that Thompson voted for a bill by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., last year that would have given affected industries the right to have courts review agency regulations before they go into effect.
Carol Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the Dole bill "was aimed at EPA. . . . It was about tying us up in process so that we could never make a decision."
Of Thompson's effort, Browner said the administration will reserve judgment until they see a bill.
The Sierra Club's Weiss said, "We don't know what his (Thompson's) plans are for 1997, but we are not encouraged by the fact that he supported Sen. Dole's bill in 1997 and we want make sure that Tennesseans know that Sen. Thompson got more than half-a-million dollars from polluters and then voted for pollution."
In particular, environmental groups are worried that the regulatory reform bill could become a vehicle to block a proposed EPA standard for particulate and ozone emissions that would require industries to filter out particles less than one-quarter the size of particles allowed by current standards.
"We believe that the agenda of the industries is not to make the lives of the American people better, but to sabotage rules and protections that would benefit the public," said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust.
"We are concerned in general by all members who show they have taken large contributions from industry. That per se doesn't make them evil but the industry does expect something in return - access. They just don't just do it for the heck of it."
Thompson denies that contributions to his campaign bring the corporate donors any special access.
"The problem is not access when you have - like I did - 13,000 contributors. All candidates have thousands and thousands of contributors.
"I think the problem is you get into campaigns that used to cost a million are now up to $2 million and there is so much money it creates a perception problem. And I think sometimes if there is too much money from one source, I think it creates a perception problem," Thompson said.
Thompson is somewhat exasperated that he's drawing criticism before he's even laid down a bill. He says his aim is to produce a bipartisan bill that President Clinton would sign into law. He is working with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., one of the senators whose filibuster doomed last year's bill.
"What I am doing shows that no good deed goes unpunished," said Thompson.
" I am sitting down with Sen. Levin, who has a bill that he is working on, to see if I can join his bill to make it a bipartisan bill so that we can come up with something reasonable. That should say it all."