Washington Maydays -- Inside the Sausage Factory by Fred Armentrout

Close-up, it's an ugly business, lawmaking. Bismarck got that right, when he equated watching lawmakers at work to being in a sausage works. Especially so in the U.S. House of Representatives, where our intrepid group of "doorknockers" from the American Chamber of Commerce makes the most rounds each year, in defense of what was once tagged by the misnomer, "Most Favored Nation" or WN status for China. It became the annual "Normal Trade Relations" or NTR debate, by act of Congress last year, and, this year, had "Permanent" lodged in front, to become PNTR. Such are the wiles of sausage-making. PNTR for China is what we were after.

About 15 AmCham Hong Kong people, three officers of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and my daughter, a sophomore at American University in Washington, D.C., split into small teams to see about 120 people, over four days in May. Citizen lobbyists don't have the luxury of time. Our teams saw 30 to 40 people a day, following daily breakfast briefings, at 7.30arn. Our reward was the best possible lesson in American civics, close up and perso'nal.

"Walking the walk" in Congress is very much a pedestrian exercise. The grounds were designed before the birth of shopping malls and road rage, the fastest and preferred mode of transport remains foot-power. Although there is an underground train that connects offices of the two houses to the Capitol building, it's seldom used except in inclement weather.

The Capitol building and Library of Congress, across a common from it, are as trafficked by busloads of gobsmacked tourists as by Congressional staff, mostly agog at the 18th Century architectural trappings of the modern world's last remaining superpower.

There are three office buildings about a city block away on either side of the Capitol, where the voting is done, one side for the House, one for the Senate. Voting procedures in the U.S. Congress still require a physical presence, which is why it ' s common to see Senators and Representatives running to and fro between them -- often stopping on the way at the foot of those majestic Capitol steps to welcome school groups from their home district or state, with a potted lecture on civic pride and duty in the land of the free. We're talkin' tomorrow's voters here, folks.

The three buildings that house representatives have no "class" at all and were never meant to have. Office interiors for all but the most senior people are on par with the size of flats in Hong Kong housing estates. Minority party House committee staffs are, quite literally, tucked into basement storage rooms. Furnishings are usually tacky collections of political pictures and memorabilia, occasionally enlivened with local arts festival or product posters (you always know when you're in one of the South's peanut-growing districts) and, always, an enlarged official map of their district as the central icon in the foyer.Congressmen never forget from whence their power derives.

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Small wonder. These days, only Steve Forbes can afford to run for office without a discernible constituency.

These tiny offices are packed with a jumbled array of professional "Hill staffers" and district interns. Most dress and act like they're still on campus or about to launch dotcoms. All constantly avert their attention to the C-span television monitors that track ongoing proceedings on the floor of the House.

People who like tidy governance_ are especially put off by the non-stop meetings in ad hoc places, like hallways and, on occasions, with everyone '"thinking on their feet", while walking a Congressman to Capitol Hill, so she or he can be on the floor in time for a vote.

Meetings can be dishearteningly parochial. One fellow announced outright as to how he knew nothing about foreign affairs and cared less. He concerned himself only with why he was elected: the promise to have changed the designation of an abandoned arsenal in his district near Joliet, Illinois, to new use as a job-creating free trade zone. Another, from Arizona, awaited results of his calls for a new federal highway, before fretting over doing the right thing by the Chinese people. It has been estimated that 40 percent of the members of Congress have never had a passport; meaning they've never traveled abroad. These are "down home" folks and proud of it. They also fear a tendency for the American press to portray Congressional foreign travel as a boondoggle (largely because it so often has been).

Congressmen are usually quite open about their views and how these often differ from the forces that press upon their votes. It's common for them to point out they come from a "labor district" and dare not raise the ire of local unions, though they may favor PNTR as a benefit to American people; or to explain that their junior status means they must defer to their political party leaders on foreign affairs. Often votes against PNTR are viewed as "free votes'', meaning it pleases some constituency, at home or in the hierarchy of the House, but has only symbolic impact, since the resultant bill will not pass the Senate or the President has vowed a veto and everyone already knows it lacks the votes for an override.

"Where's the leadership!" bemoaned some doorknockers. Those of us experienced in these matters knew the leadership was too tied up fretting over the color of Monica Lewinsky's dresses, for most of the last few years, to spend much time stepping out of the box of narrow partisanship on China issues.

Get some pork in their barrels and the vote's yours, some would say, and often do in the U.S. press. Their constituents would declaim, "And damned right to do so, too!". Untidy stuff, this democratic process.

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Then there's the believers: Congressmen from the religious right who seriously think abortion is murder and believe that one of the tenets of American exceptionalism is our unwavering defense ofreligious freedom. Most Americans agree with the latter.

There's the aging "Cold Warriors'', who think the only good Communist is a, well, "Ex-Communist". One year, a decorated Vietnam War veteran in our delegation presented the Chamber position on China's WTO accession only to be asked by a Southern Congressman, "Boy, how do you sleep at night, knowing you're helping those Communists?" Another was similarly derided for providing several thousand jobs for Chinese people in a Fujian province shoe factory. AmCham delegates are well-briefed as to how punch-ups are invariably counterproductive.

There's the people who refuse to believe the American Civil War was fought for any reason other than the.end qf slavery and human rights abuses here and everywhere, for all time, now known as "Human Rights" activists. There's the Women's Congressional Caucus and the Black Congressional Caucus and, yes, the Hong Kong Congressional Caucus. These are subgroups of Congressmen whose membership is based on gender, ethnicity or subjects of special interest to the members.

With over 500 members of the House of Representatives and over 100 in the Senate, there is no cast of mind, cause or ethical threshold unrepresented in American government. Rep. Bobby Rush, from Chicago, is a former member of the Black Panther Party militant group. There are former professional athletes and war heroes, "outed" Gays and, of course, lots oflawyers. Messy.

On any given day, on the grassy, tree-lined mall that runs, roughly, from Capitol Hill to the spired obelisk that is the Washington Monument, there may be labor activists or anti-China activists or Falun( Gong practitioners or pro-choice feminists or, as at the end of our visit, the Million Mom March for better gun controls, led by a Congresswoman whose husband and son had been shot down on a commuter train. She was joined by a Black Congressman whose son had also died by the gun.

And in the halls of Congre.t;.,:::;ur dtorknock week? One of our teams chatted with anti-PNTR dissident, Wei · on an elevator. He remains unconvinced. Our team rubbed shoulders with Madeleine Albright (almost invisible rushing down the hall within a phalanx of bodyguards) and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. (perhaps visiting his son, a Congressman) between meetings in the halls. Wheat growers were everywhere handing out badges in support of PNTR and labor groups were close behind threatening retaliation from America's shop floors if it passed.

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Why travel 10,000 miles to joust in this imbroglio? For one, us "doorknockers" like to think House passage of PNTR for China this year was our doing (with a lot of help from Martin Lee and C.H. Tung, in that order of influence in Washington).

After over 10 years of our annual sojourns to the Hill, the knuckleheads finally got it right (though they tagged it with a singularly inauspicious number: HR 4444!). But that's my parochial view.

There is also this from the French poet, Paul Valery: "Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations."

After two Asian wars in my lifetime, I believe there must be a better way. Conversely, my -daughter just got an A on her Politics course essay, a mock "presidential memo" in which , she calls for U.S. support of Taiwan's unilateral declaration of independence from China. Why? "They're a democracy and we have the military might to support it." Reminds me of a poster I saw on a U.S. aircraft carrier; a photo of the ship, with this caption: "90,000

Diplomacy".

Generation gap? Harbinger of yet another "coming conflict with China"? Go figure. Americans have been working at this freedom thing for over two centuries and not one would likely claim we've yet got it right.

What lesson, then, for Hong Kong's halting progress toward democracy? Deal with it.

Fred Armentrout is the Publications Manager for the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. This was his fifth annual Washington "Doorknock" and the Chamber's eleventh.