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Can Deregulating Toilets Revive Republicans?: Andrew Ferguson
Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.
Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- ``Five toilets,'' my neighbor said last week, watching the plumber drive away. ``We have five toilets in our house. And not one of them works worth a damn.''
Although the numbers may change -- five is a lot of toilets for one house, I admit -- the universal complaint has remained the same for a decade or more.
And now it gains a special urgency as Republicans in Washington seek ways to move beyond the Abramoff lobbying scandal and demonstrate their renewed devotion to the principle that brought them to power: to be the party of small government, doing battle against an imperial bureaucratic state that's in thrall to self-interested elites and manned by know-it-alls and buttinskis.
My friend's complaint about toilets originates in just such governmental overreaching. The story is a Washington classic, as illuminating of the capital's customs as the Abramoff scandal.
The tale begins in 1992, when a Democratic Congress passed and a Republican president signed the Energy Policy Act.
It was a massive bill, similar to the behemoths that grind their way through Congress today, so dense with special favors that no single legislator could possibly know all that it contained.
The Flush Gush
Relatively few people were aware that, folded into the bill's fine print, was a provision empowering the Department of Energy -- Buttinskis Unlimited -- to require a new national standard in the kinds of toilets Americans could buy.
For decades, pampered Americans had luxuriated in commodes using at least 3.5 gallons of water per flush -- often more, up to five, six, even seven gallons per blissful flush.
The new regulations cut that flush to a rinse. Within two years, no new toilet could use more than 1.6 gpf, or six liters. Massive savings in water use would supposedly result.
There was much that was curious about this provision. Though drastic in its nationwide ramifications, it answered no drastic, nationwide demand or need. Some areas of the country were pressed by overuse of water -- most notably parts of California -- but the U.S. as a whole never faced even the possibility of a general water shortage.
Dark Origins
``It was slipped in so quietly, nobody quite knew what was going on till the new standard took effect and the new toilets started appearing,'' says Ben Lieberman, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who studied the issue back in the mid- nineties, when he held a similar position with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Lieberman and others discovered the obscure provision's dark origins. Professional environmentalists, hoping to alarm consumers and discourage water use, had pushed for lower gpf standards in several individual states, including the massive market of California.
Faced with a patchwork of state standards, plumbing trade groups joined with the environmentalists in seeking a single, national standard. Manufacturers saw the possibility of streamlining consumer choice and introducing a line of new, expensive -- and mandatory -- toilets.
Thus was born a legislatively unbeatable coalition. On one side were sanctimonious environmentalists, avaricious big business and feather-bedding trade unionists, all seeking to enlist the power of the federal government to achieve their self-interested ends.
And on the other side? Nothing but clueless U.S. consumers. They never knew what hit them.
Terrible Idea
``It was a terrible idea,'' Lieberman says, ``and the toilets were terrible, too.''
The new 1.6 gpf models had to be flushed two or three times each use and even then succumbed to constant clogging. They backed up easily, causing sanitary, not to mention olfactory, problems. Utility officials reported sewage system blockages caused by insufficient quantities of water flowing through community pipes -- blockages that were undone only by flushing the pipes with thousands of gallons of fresh water.
No surprise then that by 2000 several reports showed that the new generation of toilets had brought minimal water savings.
Meanwhile, a grassroots consumer revolt gained momentum. Contractors risked $2,500 fines to form a Soviet-style black market in pre-1992 toilets. Acres of op-ed columns, full of terrible wordplay and bad puns, were published by authors who announced they were ``flush with anger'' and worse.
Yet, in 1997 and 1998 the now-Republican Congress crushed efforts to reverse the toilet mandate -- a sure and early sign of the majority's shaky commitment to more modest government.
Chilling Words
The grassroots revolt winked out too. Today's toilets are better than the first 1995 models, though not as good or as cheap as the toilets of our youth. U.S. consumers in 2006 can thus buy a worse product at a higher price than they could in 1992, thanks to the government's insistence on fixing a problem that wasn't there.
With a chill I remember, from the late 1990s, the look a plumber shot me when I pleaded with him, quietly, to find me a toilet that worked.
``No way,'' he said. ``I'm not going to jail over a toilet.''
Fair enough, I remember thinking. But what about Congress? In repealing the toilet mandate and opening the market, they would face nothing but the ire of a few professional environmentalists -- and the gratitude of a free people, suddenly made freer still.
Could there be a better way for Republicans to renew their traditional commitment to shrink government and exercise power on behalf of the general public instead of special interests -- and, in the end, put the Abramoff scandal behind them?
Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.
Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- ``Five toilets,'' my neighbor said last week, watching the plumber drive away. ``We have five toilets in our house. And not one of them works worth a damn.''
Although the numbers may change -- five is a lot of toilets for one house, I admit -- the universal complaint has remained the same for a decade or more.
And now it gains a special urgency as Republicans in Washington seek ways to move beyond the Abramoff lobbying scandal and demonstrate their renewed devotion to the principle that brought them to power: to be the party of small government, doing battle against an imperial bureaucratic state that's in thrall to self-interested elites and manned by know-it-alls and buttinskis.
My friend's complaint about toilets originates in just such governmental overreaching. The story is a Washington classic, as illuminating of the capital's customs as the Abramoff scandal.
The tale begins in 1992, when a Democratic Congress passed and a Republican president signed the Energy Policy Act.
It was a massive bill, similar to the behemoths that grind their way through Congress today, so dense with special favors that no single legislator could possibly know all that it contained.
The Flush Gush
Relatively few people were aware that, folded into the bill's fine print, was a provision empowering the Department of Energy -- Buttinskis Unlimited -- to require a new national standard in the kinds of toilets Americans could buy.
For decades, pampered Americans had luxuriated in commodes using at least 3.5 gallons of water per flush -- often more, up to five, six, even seven gallons per blissful flush.
The new regulations cut that flush to a rinse. Within two years, no new toilet could use more than 1.6 gpf, or six liters. Massive savings in water use would supposedly result.
There was much that was curious about this provision. Though drastic in its nationwide ramifications, it answered no drastic, nationwide demand or need. Some areas of the country were pressed by overuse of water -- most notably parts of California -- but the U.S. as a whole never faced even the possibility of a general water shortage.
Dark Origins
``It was slipped in so quietly, nobody quite knew what was going on till the new standard took effect and the new toilets started appearing,'' says Ben Lieberman, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who studied the issue back in the mid- nineties, when he held a similar position with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Lieberman and others discovered the obscure provision's dark origins. Professional environmentalists, hoping to alarm consumers and discourage water use, had pushed for lower gpf standards in several individual states, including the massive market of California.
Faced with a patchwork of state standards, plumbing trade groups joined with the environmentalists in seeking a single, national standard. Manufacturers saw the possibility of streamlining consumer choice and introducing a line of new, expensive -- and mandatory -- toilets.
Thus was born a legislatively unbeatable coalition. On one side were sanctimonious environmentalists, avaricious big business and feather-bedding trade unionists, all seeking to enlist the power of the federal government to achieve their self-interested ends.
And on the other side? Nothing but clueless U.S. consumers. They never knew what hit them.
Terrible Idea
``It was a terrible idea,'' Lieberman says, ``and the toilets were terrible, too.''
The new 1.6 gpf models had to be flushed two or three times each use and even then succumbed to constant clogging. They backed up easily, causing sanitary, not to mention olfactory, problems. Utility officials reported sewage system blockages caused by insufficient quantities of water flowing through community pipes -- blockages that were undone only by flushing the pipes with thousands of gallons of fresh water.
No surprise then that by 2000 several reports showed that the new generation of toilets had brought minimal water savings.
Meanwhile, a grassroots consumer revolt gained momentum. Contractors risked $2,500 fines to form a Soviet-style black market in pre-1992 toilets. Acres of op-ed columns, full of terrible wordplay and bad puns, were published by authors who announced they were ``flush with anger'' and worse.
Yet, in 1997 and 1998 the now-Republican Congress crushed efforts to reverse the toilet mandate -- a sure and early sign of the majority's shaky commitment to more modest government.
Chilling Words
The grassroots revolt winked out too. Today's toilets are better than the first 1995 models, though not as good or as cheap as the toilets of our youth. U.S. consumers in 2006 can thus buy a worse product at a higher price than they could in 1992, thanks to the government's insistence on fixing a problem that wasn't there.
With a chill I remember, from the late 1990s, the look a plumber shot me when I pleaded with him, quietly, to find me a toilet that worked.
``No way,'' he said. ``I'm not going to jail over a toilet.''
Fair enough, I remember thinking. But what about Congress? In repealing the toilet mandate and opening the market, they would face nothing but the ire of a few professional environmentalists -- and the gratitude of a free people, suddenly made freer still.
Could there be a better way for Republicans to renew their traditional commitment to shrink government and exercise power on behalf of the general public instead of special interests -- and, in the end, put the Abramoff scandal behind them?
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