WASHINGTON Rep. Pete A. Tenorio says that certain U.S. lawmakers are opposed to the creation of a CNMI non-voting delegate seat in Congress. He didn’t name names, but I’m quite sure that these U.S. lawmakers include Republicans—despite the millions of dollars the CNMI had spent on GOP lobbyists.
More than five years ago, three Republican congressmen were brought here by Preston Gates. These gentlemen were John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, Dana Rohrabacher and Brian P. Bilbray, both from California. (Duncan and Rohrabacher are still in Congress, but Bilbray was one of the casualties of the GOP Taliban wing’s efforts to oust President Clinton for scoring with an intern. For his vote to impeach Bubba, Bilbray’s constituents didn’t return him to Congress in 2000.)
On Jan. 3, 1997, in a meeting with members of the 10th CNMI Legislature, the three U.S. congressmen told local lawmakers that Northern Marianas could probably get a delegate seat, but only “if it is willing to pay for the costs involved.” “Are you willing to pay for (it)?” Bilbray asked. “How much is (it) worth to you? If it’s really worth (that much) to you then we’ll consider it.” He said a delegate seat would cost about $1.3 million a year. Rohrabacher, for his part, said because CNMI residents don’t pay the federal income tax “you don’t get representation.” However, he said, extending the federal income tax law to the islands would “destroy your economy.” He added that then Gov. Lang Tenorio “made a good point on the non-voting delegate issue.” Unlike most—if not all—CNMI politicians, Lang was not too excited about having a delegate in Congress. “I don’t see the need for it,” he would tell reporters. (All he ever wanted, he would later tell us, was for the CNMI to remain a U.S. commonwealth and the feds to “leave us the hell alone.”) Rohrabacher and Bilbray agreed with him. “If you think that it would be the vehicle for improving the CNMI, (then I’m telling you that) Washington, D.C. is not the solution, and that as your governor has said, you yourselves should find solutions to the CNMI’s problems,” Rohrabacher said. It is up to the CNMI to decide whether to have a delegate seat, he added, “but if you decide (to have one), please don’t think that (it) would solve the problems you face.” According to Bilbray, “we are no longer going to treat (insular areas) like we’re your parents. We may be Uncle Sam, but we’re not mom and dad.” Rohrabacher also noted that insular areas with non-voting delegates “end up focusing on Congress” instead of finding local solutions to their problems.
Lang’s political opponents, however, were quick with their rebuttals. Then Senate President Pepero Sablan, then Speaker Diego T. Benavente and former Lt. Gov. Benjamin T. Manglona said we shouldn’t listen to the visiting U.S. congressmen nor to Lang Tenorio for that matter. Sablan said representation in Congress is a political, not an economic, issue. He also blamed Lang for “misleading” the U.S. congressmen. Later, Lang said if 50 percent of the Northern Marianas voters would favor having a delegate, he would ask Congress to create a CNMI delegate seat. Lang, however, failed to win a second term in Nov. 1997, and it is now clear that an overwhelming majority of Northern Marianas voters have always wanted a delegate seat.
So why did the islands end up with a resident representative to Washington, D.C. instead of a non-voting member of Congress?
In their extremely interesting book on the Covenant negotiations, “An Honorable Accord,” Howard Willens and Deanne Siemer said the Marianas Political Status Commission wanted a non-voting delegate once the local population reached 70,000, which was the population of the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1970 when it got its delegate. The U.S. panel, however, said Congress should decide on the matter. Later, the head of the American team, Ambassador Howard Willens, admitted to his NMI counterparts that “the message from congressional sources” was that “there would be no non-voting delegate for the Marianas.” He said the islands could “share” Guam’s delegate, but this was rejected by the NMI panel…which preferred American Samoa’s representative! The NMI later proposed that “the commonwealth be guaranteed a…delegate when its population reached 50,000.” But Rep. Phillip Burton, D-Ca., was “unrelentingly opposed” to it, Willens and Siemer said, and as he was the chairman of the House Territorial and Insular Affairs Subcommittee, the NMI had to retreat from its demand and accept the provision for a non-legislative resident representative. After all, the NMI team knew that they could still raise the issue later.
In the 1980s, the CNMI did renew its call for a non-voting delegate, but this failed, according to Willens and Siemer, “because some commonwealth…officials opposed it, believing that [it] would undercut the commonwealth’s status under the Covenant.” I guess they were referring to Lang, who was Washington representative during those years.
The authors said the willingness of the U.S. House of Representatives to accept a non-voting delegate fluctuated over time, depending on its political composition and current issues relating to the commonwealth.
In other words, timing is all. As the new Washington rep said, the issue should not be “rushed.” Pete A., incidentally, was on the Marianas Political Status Commission, so he should know.
