To Senate Holdouts, Digging In for Fight Is Nothing New

WASHINGTON —  In the legislative poker game over the balanced-budget amendment, two prairie populists from the hard-scrabble state of North Dakota on Wednesday appeared to hold nearly all the cards.

Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad and Byron L. Dorgan occupied center stage in the balanced-budget drama, reciting a host of conditions for their potential support, resolutely staring down Senate Republicans across the bargaining table and possibly sinking the measure.

For the two close friends, who followed essentially the same path into national politics, the idea of taking a gamble against powerful opponents is hardly new.

“They dig in and fight hard,” said Bob Hanson, North Dakota’s current state tax commissioner, whose political career Dorgan helped to launch.

As North Dakota state tax commissioner, Dorgan went after a handful of multinational corporate giants and raised millions in tax revenues for the state. He has proposed tax hikes for the wealthiest Americans, calling the tax code “a feedlot for the rich and a straitjacket for the rest.”

Conrad, a political brawler who also served as state tax commissioner, earned the nickname “Chainsaw” in his home state after he remarked: “When you’re going after big timber, you have to use strong tactics.” In President Clinton’s first month in office, Conrad bucked the new chief executive by opposing a sweeping energy tax.

In the current debate, Republicans are threatening the two North Dakotans with political retaliation. But both lawmakers know that they are popular back home and they expect substantial sympathy for their concerns. So far, neither appears ready to give in.

Lobbied heavily by Republican backers of the amendment Wednesday, Dorgan and Conrad continued to insist on constitutional protections for the massive Social Security Trust Fund, which foes of the amendment have said is likely to be raided to help balance the federal ledger.

And Conrad pressed for still more concessions, insisting that the budget amendment also contain an escape clause in the event of a national economic emergency.

“They’re staking out a position of risk because they’re saying, ‘This is my principle and I’m sticking with it,’ ” said Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a fellow plains-state lawmaker and a friend and political ally of both men.

“That’s a position that’s very much consistent with high-plains politicians,” Kerrey said. “It’s the only way to survive out there, politically and physically. It is the culture. Nature’s not very compromising.”

Indeed, the uncompromising nature of life and commerce on the plains will incline North Dakotans to share his concerns, Conrad predicted.

Devastated by drought and Depression in the 1930s and only recently emerged from the grips of a four-year drought, North Dakota’s dominant farming community knows from hard experience that for some disasters there is no substitute for the helping hand of federal spending--an option that would practically be foreclosed under a balanced-budget amendment.

“We are an agrarian state that has experienced deep hardship,” said Conrad, whose grandfather lost all his money in the Depression and struggled nine years to pay back his creditors.

“His stories of those days are engraved on my mind, and people in North Dakota remember very well that it took priming the pump, it took deficits to get out of that Depression,” Conrad said.

Conrad and Dorgan’s shared experience in the office of state tax commissioner also drove their positions in this week’s wrangling. In interviews throughout the day Wednesday, both lawmakers warned that as long as Social Security taxes could be used to help balance the budget, worker pensions are being diverted for purposes other than those promised. That, said both men, would be unacceptable.

“Sen. Dorgan and I come from financial backgrounds and we both know that if any head of a company proposed this, he’d be on his way to federal prison,” Conrad told The Times. “In North Dakota, people are very straight. This kind of deal, where you say you’re doing something, and you’re doing something else, that doesn’t go over well. People’s word still means something out there.”

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.