My life

In the awful week between the crash and the funeral, I carried on with my duties as best I could. First, I signed the new farm bill. Just two weeks earlier, I had signed legislation that improved the farm credit system, to make more loans available to farmers at lower interest rates. Although I thought the new farm bill failed to provide an adequate safety net for family farms, I signed it anyway because if the current law expired without a replacement, farmers would have to plant their next crop under the completely inadequate support program put in place back in 1948. Also, the bill had many provisions I did support: greater flexibility for farmers in choosing what crops to plant without losing aid; money for economic development in rural communities; funds to help farmers prevent soil erosion, air and water pollution, and the loss of wetlands; and $200 million to begin work on one of my top environmental priorities, the restoration of Florida’s Everglades, which had been damaged by extensive development and sugarcane growing.

On the ninth I signed legislation granting the President a line-item veto. Most governors had the authority and every President since Ulysses Grant in 1869 had sought it. The provision was also part of the Republican “Contract with America,” and I had endorsed it in my 1992 campaign. I was pleased that it had finally passed, and I thought its main utility would be in the leverage it gave future Presidents to keep wasteful items out of budgets in the first place. Signing the bill had one significant downside: Senator Robert Byrd, the most respected authority in Congress on the Constitution, considered it an unconstitutional infringement on the legislative branch by the executive. Byrd hated the line-item veto with a passion most people reserve for more personal injuries, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for signing the bill.

On the day of Ron Brown’s memorial service, I vetoed a bill that banned a procedure its proponents called “partial-birth” abortion. The legislation as described by its anti-abortion advocates was highly popular; it prohibited a type of late-term abortion that seemed so heartless and cruel that many prochoice citizens thought it should be banned. It was a bit more complicated than that. As far as I could determine, the procedure was rare, and it was predominantly performed on women whose doctors had told them it was necessary to preserve their own lives or health, often because they were carrying hydrocephalic babies who were certain to die before, during, or shortly after childbirth. The question was how badly damaged the mothers’ bodies would be if they carried their doomed babies to term, and whether doing so could render them unable to bear other children. In such cases, it was far from clear that banning the operation was “pro-life.”

I thought it should be a decision for the mother and her doctor. When I vetoed the bill, I stood with five women who had undergone partial-birth abortions. Three of them, a Catholic, an evangelical Christian, and an Orthodox Jew, were devoutly pro-life. One of them said she had prayed to God to take her life and spare her child, and all of them said they had consented to the late-term procedure only because their doctors had told them their babies could not have lived, and they wanted to be able to have other children.

If you consider how long it took me to explain why I vetoed the bill, you understand why it was terrible politics to do so. I vetoed it because no one had shown me evidence that the women’s advocates had been untruthful in saying the procedure was necessary or that there was another alternative procedure that would have protected the mothers and their reproductive capacity. I had offered to sign a bill banning all late-term abortions except in cases where the life or health of the mother was at risk. Several states still permitted them, and such action could have prevented far more abortions than the partial-birth bill, but the anti-abortion forces in Congress killed it. They were looking for a way to erode Roe v. Wade; besides, there was no political advantage to a bill that even most pro-choice senators and representatives would support.

On April 12, I named Mickey Kantor secretary of commerce and his able deputy, Charlene Barshefsky, the new U.S. trade representative. I also named Frank Raines, vice chairman of Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, to be head of the Office of Management and Budget. Raines had the right combination of intellect, knowledge of the budget, and political skills to succeed at OMB, and was the first African-American ever to hold the job.