Not Guilty
By Ramesh Ponnuru
February 5, 2002 8:55 a.m.
Phil Gramm
You may have heard that Phil Gramm, Republican senator from Texas, had done some of Enron's bidding in 2000. Numerous newspapers, relying on a report by the Naderite group Public Citizen, reported that Gramm had slipped through a provision exempting some of Enron's business from regulation. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it on January 17, "In December 2000 Mr. Gramm was one of the ringleaders who engineered the stealthlike approval of a bill that exempted energy commodity trading from government regulation and public disclosure. It was a gift tied with a bright ribbon for Enron." This was Herbert's first example in a column dedicated to the proposition that "When Senator Phil Gramm and his wife Wendy danced, it was most often to Enron's tune."
Public Citizen had Gramm "muscling through" the offending provision. In fact, Gramm had almost nothing to do with it. He didn't write it: It came to the Senate from the House, where it was part of a bill that passed by a large margin. He didn't usher it through the Senate: It was considered by the Agriculture Committee, of which he was not a member, rather than the Banking Committee, which he chaired. Indeed, Gramm blocked the bill that included the provision for several months because he objected to other provisions. He did, however, eventually vote for the bill, like most congressmen. It included the offending provision, which had hardly been altered during the legislative process.
Several publications have had to print corrections for linking Gramm to the provision — notably the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Herbert's column has not been corrected, but the day after it ran the New York Times ran a story by Jeff Gerth and Richard Oppel that noted the inconvenient truth: "[In late 2000] Senator Gramm, for reasons unrelated to Enron, was single-handedly blocking a futures trading bill the company had dearly prized."
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