By Mike Mills
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 4, 1996; Page H01

After nearly a decade of bitter lobbying by the telephone and television industries, House and Senate lawmakers had finally crafted an overhaul of the nation's telecommunications laws that all of those interests could grudgingly support.

Last week, only Robert J. Dole stood in the way.

On Wednesday morning in the Senate majority leader's chambers, a group that included House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and the bill's sponsors -- Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) and Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.) -- urged Dole to send the legislation to President Clinton.

But Dole was reluctant, according to several who attended the meeting. For six weeks the presidential contender had been stalling the bill because, he said, one of its provisions would let television network owners receive a "multibillion-dollar giveaway" by getting free licenses to provide new digital television services.

The issue worked well with Dole's broader campaign theme of ending so-called corporate welfare programs.

"I just literally begged" Dole not to change the bill and to bring it to a vote, Pressler said. "I said we had a Camelot moment when we had peace between these greedy, squabbling interests. We can pass a bill. Dole told me the next day I looked green, because I was so insistent."

Dole relented, after winning assurances that the broadcaster issue would be addressed later this year. Now the telecommunications measure awaits Clinton's signature, after rapidly and overwhelmingly passing both the House and Senate Thursday afternoon.

By gingerly defusing Dole's problem and by steering clear of other, more partisan land mines, Pressler and Bliley handed the Republican-led Congress what they call the 104th Congress's most substantive legislative accomplishment.

They did it by trying something unusual for Republicans in this Congress: They worked closely with Democrats to complete the bill, despite efforts by GOP colleagues -- particularly in the leadership -- to pass a far more deregulatory measure that most certainly would have drawn a Clinton veto.

"I bent over backwards trying to include Democrats, to the point of offending Republicans," Pressler said.

"He was persistent and he stuck with me," said Pressler's predecessor as Commerce Committee chairman, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.).

When he became Commerce Committee chairman a year ago, Pressler was regarded by many of his colleagues as an unlikely champion of the complex telecommunications reform effort. Pressler became the committee chairman by virtue of his seniority over former senator Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) -- regarded as one of the congressional experts on the issue.

Pressler surprised many by hand-delivering his original draft of the telecommunications bill to each member of the Commerce Committee, a chore usually delegated to congressional staff.

Bliley, a former funeral home director and mayor of Richmond, shunned the technical details of the bill. Instead, he kept in mind a single fact that, to him, epitomized the need to bring competition to the Bell monopolies: He said it drives him crazy that today it costs more to place a phone call from Richmond to Norfolk than it does from Richmond to Los Angeles.

In some respects, Pressler and Bliley were handed the ball on the 20-yard line by Democrats who had been trying, and failing, to pass telecommunications legislation for years. The last major rewrite of the legislation was in 1935.

Former Democratic committee and subcommittee chairmen including Hollings, John D. Dingell (Mich.) and Edward J. Markey (Mass.) had spent nearly a decade haggling with telephone, broadcast and cable company lobbyists.

Lawmakers seemed stuck in a legislative hamster wheel, riding an annual cycle of hearings, legislative drafts, campaign contributions, industry trade shows, golf outings, jurisdictional squabbles and, ultimately, gridlock.

"There was a point at which I realized that every single member of our subcommittee had his own personal lobbyist," Markey said.

Meanwhile, federal communications laws and regulations became less and less relevant as technology and markets evolved. A 1992 law capping cable television prices was the exception -- and now that law has been largely undone by the new legislation.

Over the years, in incremental steps, Markey and others shaped the idea that local telephone companies would have to give up their monopolies in exchange for the right to enter new markets such as long-distance and cable television. Once that idea was accepted by the Bells, Markey said, only the details remained. Dole killed the bill in 1994 when the Bells backed away from supporting it.

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, they invited communications industry CEOs to Washington to "ask them what they wanted in a bill," according to Bliley. After hearing the answer, the GOP attempted to draft a far-reaching measure that would result in immediate deregulation of cable TV rates and greatly relaxed limits on broadcast station ownership. But to avert a Clinton veto, the final legislation ended up looking very similar to the bill that died in Congress in 1994 before Democrats lost control, according to Markey.

Early in mid-December, Republicans saw Vice President Gore on the evening news saying that negotiations on a final bill were concluded, that the administration was very pleased and that Clinton would sign the measure.

It turned out to be a strategic error -- the vice president appeared to be taking credit for the measure. Rep. Jack M. Fields Jr. (R-Tex.), a chief sponsor of the bill, "was in hyper rage," one aide said. He immediately asked Republicans to withhold support, stalling the bill through the holidays.

"House Republicans decided to imitate the speaker. They threw a fit because they didn't get a good seat on the airplane," said an administration official, referring to Gingrich's complaint that he was treated rudely by Clinton on Air Force One when they went to Israel for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. "The idea of somebody else getting credit for something just rubbed them the wrong way."

Dole raised the broadcaster issue shortly after the Gore episode. "Gore stole [credit] from the Republicans," Pressler said. "It may well be that Dole wanted to say, `Hey, I can stop this thing. I'm in charge here.' "

What changed Dole's mind, sources attending the meeting said, was the need for some kind of Republican legislative achievement after bruising losses on the budget, the government shutdown and the poor reviews given Dole's response to Clinton's State of the Union address. "We told him we needed to get a `W' [for `win'] on the board," one Republican aide said.

Dole chief of staff Sheila Burke said only that "Senator Dole's key objectives were met. They agreed not to pursue giving away [licenses]" until Congress takes up the issue.

Ultimately, Pressler and Bliley succeeded in persuading Dole and Fields that the fragile consensus of the local and long-distance telephone lobbies, as well as the cable and broadcast industries, was such a rare achievement that partisan politics should be set aside.

"It proves that with all this hurly-burly in Washington, the government shutdown, the partisanship, that Congress can have one moment," Pressler said. "It was a golden moment. If we'd have waited any longer, it would have all come unraveled."