The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com

For Norton, A Party Mission

By William Booth
Monday, January 8, 2001

On a June evening in 1998, in the big ballroom of the J.W. Marriott on Pennsylvania Avenue, Gale A. Norton hosted the national kickoff for an organization she founded that is now called, after several name changes, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy.

To understand why environmentalists in Washington are so worried about President-elect Bush's choice of Norton for interior secretary -- and why conservatives are applauding the nomination -- CREA is a good place to start.

The organization was conceived by Norton, then the outgoing Colorado attorney general. Its purpose: to confront an "overriding problem," as its first mailings put it, that "over the last two decades, Democrats have created the impression that they are the defenders of the environment while Republicans are environmental destroyers. Our bad guy image hampers the election of Republican candidates and makes it difficult to promote common-sense policies."

Norton, through CREA, vowed to do something about that. The June gathering was part of her plan. The gathering included a Who's Who of GOP powerhouses in Congress.

The guest of honor was Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.). The keynote address was delivered by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.). The sponsors for the gala that night included the National Coal Council, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the National Mining Association, the Chlorine Chemical Council and the political consulting firm of Karl Rove, one of Bush's closest advisers.

To environmental advocacy groups in Washington, CREA represents everything they fear about Norton. Their concern is that as the steward of America's public lands and the gamekeeper of the nation's wildlife, she is beholden to the extractive industries and will open up large tracts of land to mining, oil and gas drilling, and timber harvesting; that she will side with private property owners and businesses against the needs of endangered creatures.

Indeed, the head of a rival GOP group, Martha Marks -- founder and president of Republicans for Environmental Protection -- accuses CREA of being nothing more than a front to gussy up the poor records of some Republican officeholders.

"It's the classic green scam," Marks said, "green scam" meaning to slap the "green" label on someone or something that is actually working against conservation and environmental protections.

CREA members have given awards to GOP officeholders, have spoken at conferences and have issued a couple of reports and briefed Republicans. Marks calls the reports nothing more than "a Web page and a press release."

But to Norton's supporters, a group such as CREA is just the right medicine for a Washington-driven environmentalism that they say has run amok.

What, these supporters (who include GOP governors of the western states) ask, is wrong with working with industry? Norton's allies say that America's public lands should be able to support "multiple use," meaning serving not only as wildlife refuges but also as the source for materials that Americans and the economy need to continue to grow and prosper.

"She will definitely be more favorably disposed to multiple uses," said Colorado Gov. Bill Owens (R). "She won't lock up our lands, sight unseen. She'll be concerned with the rights of private property versus public need. But she will not be throwing Molotov cocktails. She will not be Jim Watt," the controversial interior secretary of the early years of the Reagan administration.

"Gale Norton will be a very considered and very steady secretary of the interior," Owens said.

The environmental community, however, promises to go to war over Norton's confirmation. "She is going to be very, very controversial," said Greg Wetstone, director of programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "And she will be vigorously opposed."

At this point, of course, no one really knows what kind of interior secretary Norton might make, but her résumé gives clues to her personality and politics.

She was raised in Thornton, Colo., a suburb of Denver. Her father was an aircraft mechanic and an admirer of legendary conservative Barry M. Goldwater.

Norton, 46, blasted through the University of Denver, first as an undergraduate majoring in political science, and then in the law school. She posted a perfect score on her Law School Admissions Test. In high school, she protested the war in Vietnam.

Her politics took a turn after the young Norton began reading Ayn Rand novels such as "The Fountainhead." She became active in Libertarian Party politics and served as a delegate when Edward Clark ran for the White House on the Libertarian ticket in 1980.

After graduating from law school, Norton was hired in 1979 by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which was founded by James G. Watt. "She sought us out," Watt recalled last week. "She wanted to work for a cause-driven public law foundation."

Mountain States was formed in 1977, supported by money from the Coors beer-brewing family, as a way for conservatives to use the courts to further their aims in public policy and the law. Over the years, Mountain States has taken on cases that sought to overturn affirmative action set-asides, to oppose windfall profit taxes for oil companies, and to pursue a "wise use" agenda by opening more public lands for hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, mining, logging, and oil and gas exploration.

Watt called Norton "a first-class lawyer" and "a great gal who has come into her own."

After leaving Mountain States in 1983, Norton chose another ideologically driven job. She became a scholar at Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institute, where she explored new ways to control air pollution -- not by regulation, but by using such then-novel methods as market incentives.

Watt said he "sponsored" Norton and brought her into the Reagan administration as a political appointee, first in the Agriculture Department and then as associate solicitor at the Interior Department.

While at Interior, Norton was one of the authors of a report that supported opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- a vast wilderness area filled with caribou and polar bears -- to oil exploration.

Don Barry, an executive vice president of the Wilderness Society, was previously head attorney at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service but left the department right before Norton came aboard. She would have been his boss. Barry describes Norton as "a very nice person, and a very conservative person." He was impressed that Norton contacted him about whom she should name as his replacement, and that she appointed the person he recommended, a career government lawyer.

"She chose competency and knowledge over political ideology," Barry said.

Norton returned to private practice in Colorado in 1987. Married once and divorced, she got married for a second time, to real estate agent John Hughes. She was elected in 1990 and 1994 as attorney general and worked under a Democratic governor, Roy Romer.

Pam Eaton, regional director of the Colorado-based Wilderness Society, said that, as attorney general, Norton did not leave much of a record on environmental issues. But Eaton gave Norton credit for allowing her attorneys to pursue corporate polluters.

"She did not put an ideological spin on things," Eaton said. "But I tell people that in Colorado her job was to enforce the laws of the state. Her job at Interior will be to formulate rules and laws."

Eaton and other environmentalists insist that more telling than her tenure as attorney general is her early mentoring by Watt, and her continued alliances with groups that say Washington is trampling property rights in the name of the environment.

However, Norton did not hide her views on the environment. She has openly criticized the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 as good legislation gone bad -- as the federal government took more and more power away from state and local governments.

Norton has often criticized the federal government, which she has called the worst polluter in the nation for the toxic mess it has left behind at government weapons factories and military bases. She tangled with Washington and won the right to enforce Colorado's stricter cleanup standards at the Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

As attorney general, she also sought to allow companies to "self-audit" their pollution, a policy that the Environmental Protection Agency has vigorously opposed.

Denis Berckefeldt, secretary of the Colorado Democratic Party, said that in his state, "which is dominated by the right wing," Norton is generally considered a moderate, mostly because she supports abortion rights.

In 1996, she ran for the Senate but lost in the primary to a more conservative opponent, the eventual winner, Wayne Allard (R). Though considered a Colorado moderate, in her stump speeches she called for federal term limits, a limited role for the federal government, a two-thirds-majority requirement in Congress for tax increases and the elimination of the departments of Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development.

Her nomination as interior secretary was a surprise to almost everyone in Colorado. The front-runner for that position was Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), but his nomination would have tilted the balance of power in the evenly divided Senate. When it appeared that the Bush team was moving away from Campbell, Owens, who is close to Bush, suggested Norton.

Her nomination, according to knowledgeable sources, was greatly eased by Rove, who had worked for Norton on her Senate bid.

Her former mentor, Watt, said: "The one thing the press never understands is that Cabinet officers are loyal to their president." Why was Norton chosen? "She was picked because Bush believes that she will carry out his agenda," Watt said.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company