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Show Thursday. July Dpi nwns 26. 1984 - THE HERALD, Provo. Utah. , , .. r Page 37 - tail cartoonists discuss vital issues The Herald Comments fivo Steel l Rust U.S. Steel's Geneva plant is locked in a bat- 1 tle for survival that nr-- ,F seems to be getting 11 hi) ter II hot- by the day. Plant managers have been fighting to keep the plant solvent re- k through cessions, years of paying for incredibly exback-to-bac- pensive air cleaning equipment, and lately through a period of increasing pressure from imported steel. Steel is being sold in the Western U.S. mar--w984 Dy NE A S'A Inr "...and being of sound mind, I hereby leave my season tickets to the USFL's WORST team to..." ket and elsewhere in the United States for less than it costs foreign producers to manufacture. Geneva's managers and steelmakers have been remarkably suc- cessful. But the latest fight is growing more grim by the day and underlines the message that provements im- already made are only a begin- ning. Geneva is at the point that nothing should be considered sacred. Managers and unions must meet competition head-o- n. To do that, Utah County steelmakers will have to cut costs, improve prductivity and boost quality. That probably means contract concessions, among other things. Foreign steel is being dumped in the West in unprecedented ties. VI quanti- Geneva's operators should be commended for the remarkable way labor and management have cooperated to make the strides they have. But the reopening of Kaiser's Fontana Mill in California and the of the mill's involvement with a Japanese company bodes ill for Geneva. That means tough competition will get tougher. It means that even if government relief from imports is granted, Geneva will still find itself in one of the world's toughest steel markets. If 14 Geneva is a major contributor to Utah Valley's economy and ail of us have a stake in the plant's future, but none has a bigger stake than those who work at the plant. As tough decisions are made over the next few months about the cost of doing business in Utah County, it is important that all of us be firm in the conviction to see that Geneva makes it, even if it does re- quire sacrifice. There is absolutely no way to replace the kinds of jobs, the tax income and the spin-of- f benefits a healthy Geneva provides. Washington Window flex Lee Defends Top Court Verdicts By PAT THORNE Herald Washington Bureau - WASHINGTON Solicitor General Rex E. Lee last week said anticipating future appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court should be an important issue to voters this fall. Appearing on the KUED program "Utah Congressional Report," the Utah legal scholar, on leave from Young University the Brigham Law School, said he believes making appointments to the High Court is "one of the most important things, if not the most important single thing, that a president does." Five of the nine sitting justices are now 75 or older: William J. Brennan Jr., 78; Lewis F. Powell Jr., 76; Thurgood Marshall, 76; Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, 76, and Harry A. Blackmun, 75. It is anticipated by court observers that one or more of the justices will step down in the near future, a possibility that has neither escaped the notice of Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mon-dal- e nor President Reagan. Pointing out that President Franklin Roosevelt appointed about half a dozen Supreme Court justices, Lee said those appointments had an effect on the nation for decades beyond the time he died. "They continue to have an effect because of the precedential value of what those justices did," he said. The writers of the U.S. Constitution "got it just right," he added. "There needs to be an insulation of those who decide constitutional issues from the political process. They need to have the independence. "But there is, a relationship between the people on the one hand and the court on the other. It happens through the election of a president," he explained. Lee himself has been prominently mentioned as a possible never-the-les- Reagan s, appointment to the court in a second term. As the administration's top attorney representing the government before the court, he has achieved an outstanding success record in the term just ended. The court declared laws or government practices in violation of the Constitution, in only 17 of the more than 150 cases it decided and reversed lower court decision in about 71 percent of cases as compared to less than 60 percent the year before. Because of a series of major decisions approving administration proposals on civil and individual rights, business, environmental, and criminal law, observers have described the term as the most conservative in decades. Lee disputes that premise. "This term we have seen a move to broaden the concept of the individuals whose rights are to be taken into account, both by the Constitution and in other respects," he said. The court, in nearly every area of the law, upheld government positions and deferred to the authority of Congress, the executive branch and states and cities. It clearly shied away fro rulings that would enlarge individual rights. The term cized by the American Civil Liberties Union as "appalling" and "statist." ACLU said the court no longer serves as "a vigorous guardian of individuals but as a cheerleader of the government." Lee countered that the interests represented by government are "very much those of indiindividuals who want viduals to be secure in their persons and their homes, who want to have the liberty of being free was sharply criti- from the commission of crimes." The court is not statist, he declared. "It is not a matter of some hypothetical, mysterious, that is labeled government that is on the other side of the balance scale from the criminally accused," he con- non-enti- ty tinued. Government, in most cases, was protecting the rights of the mass of individual citizens, he explained. Lee said that broadening of the concept of the individual is one of two major trends clearly emerging from the court this year. He said the second trend is that the court will not make law where Congress has not. In other words, if a law does not deal with a specific circumstance, the court will not fill in the blanks. "That is a very significant approach because it says rather than our stepping in and the judges making the law, we will leave it to the two elected the branches of government Congress and the Executive Branch in implementing what Congress has said. In the event Congress wants to correct it, it can," he said. The Utahn said the court is not telling Congress what it must do, but merely telling Congress that its responsibility is to make the laws. Lee said the decision in the case of Grove City College v. Bell was proper. That decision disregarded a decade of admin- istration interpretating in holding that only particular programs which receive federal aid would have to comply with anti-se- x discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Congress is scrambling in the reauthorization of the act to reverse the Supreme Court decision. "A lot of people have said if Congress now rewrites the law, that will show that we were wrong in taking the position we did in Grove City. Not at all. Because what is before Congress now is what Congress means in 1984. The only thing the Grove City case held was what Congress meant in 1972," Lee said. He said the most significant decision cf the term was that excludealing with the sionary rule barring the use of illegally obtained evidence. "The function of the exclusionary rule is to exclude evidence of a crime, when that evidence has been seized in violation of Constitutional rights," he explained. "What these decisions hold is that where there is nothing to deter, because the police have acted reasonably, then we're not going to exclude the evidence," he said. 1 Will Reagan Run Against By NORMAN D. SANDLER WASHINGTON (UPI) -- After almost four years in the White House, Ronald Reagan the outsider, leader of a conservative revolt against the trend of government over the last 40 years is still running against Washington. Listening to his campaign speeches, a Rip Van Winkle awakening from four years of peaceful slumber might never realize Reagan had become part of the same "big government" establishment he ran against as an outsider in 1976 and 1980. This is not 1980. But the passage of four years has done little to alter the Reagan campaign battle cry. He remains a voice of rationality, pitted against the vested interests and veteran politicians of Washington. His targets are still "the liberals" in Congress and Jimmy Carter, the latter presented in the form of Walter Mondale. It's an "us vs. them" theme that strikes at the Democrats, but hits Republicans as well. Reagan lashes out at "those in Washington " who oppose his proposal for tuition tax credit, as if to gaze at the political debate from afar and to see only Democrats on the opposite side. He belittles "those born-agai- n budget balancers" in Congress, but neglects to mention Republican anxiety over the huge deficits that have accumulated during his first term. Reagan, whose "Teflon-coated- " image is a frustration to Democrats, is able to mock the political environment he has called home for the last 3 Vz years. During a campaign trip to Iowa in February, he told a crowd of cheering supporters that coming to Des Moines from Washington was "a little like landing in the real world after an extended visit to the Twilight Zone." In Texas, he attacked "the smart sayers and seers" and "grasping politicians and indifferent bureaucrats" in Washington. Borrowing a phrase from George Wallace, he blamed years of "liberal leniency and apologies" pseudo-intellectu- al for a ica. Uisia ui Clime in nmci- - For Reagan, this theme is one that plays well in the heartland. At a Fourth of July celebration in Alabama, where he stirred passions by waxing patriotic about men and women in uniform and the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy, Reagan said he has felt that "if we just slipped out we in government and closed the doors, turned the key and disappeared for a while, it would take you a long time to miss us." No word on what would happen to the millions of people, in Alabama and elsewhere, whose livelihoods depend on government outlays for guns and but- ter. The refrain is not a new one for Reagan, who for years has regarded government especially the federal government as the antithesis of a society devoted to individual liberty. His view of official Washington and residents of its political fraternity is a throwback to the time for choosing" speech he delivered in support of Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican National Convention, which completed his transition from show business to conservative politics. "Two contrary philosophies divide us in this land of ours," Reagan said. "Either we believe in our traditional system of individual liberty, or we abandon the American revolution and confress that an intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves." And as he looks ahead to the possibility of four more years in that same "far distant capital," Reagan may be reminded of what he told a group of concrete industry representatives back in 1971, while still governor of California. "I just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C.," he said, "and have to say it's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." Even someone with such diehard principles as Reagan is entitled to change his mind. Disproves Doomsayers conomy The WASHINGTON hys- teria artists and doomsayers have a lot to answer for this year, as the economy continues exits stunning expansion ceeding everyone's expectation except that of the supply-sider- s who predicted it. The unbroken chain of yearly deficits "as $200 billion-plu- s far as the eye can see" forecast by Budget Director David Stockman has been dramatically, thanks to the economic recovery shrinking tax cuts. Stockman's wildly exaggerated $231 billion deficit target for this 1984 fiscal year actually appears to be running somewhere between $160 billion and a sharp decline $170 billion resulting from higher tax revenues, just as the supply-sider- s foretold. sparked by the 1981 stunning 4 million new jobs four times more than Britain produced in the last 32 years, and as many as Japan produced during the 1970s. Productivity shot up by 5.1 percent and the gross national product increased by 3.3 percent in real terms. of "If the economic performance calendar years were judged like fine wines," says economist Grover Norquist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "1983 would be a vintage year in- deed." year, of course, is that GNP roared upward by a powerful 9.7 percentage rate in the first quarter, followed by 7.5 percent growth in the second quarter. Stephen Roach whether the U.S. economy has entered "a new era." Meanwhile, the political question that hangs over the West Wing of the White House is The good news thus far this stick with a campaign strategy 1984. whether Ronald Reagan will What this means is that the deficits predicted by Stockman, Martin Feldstein, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and other economists are not absorbing anywhere near as much of the nation's savings as they had originally feared. "If the deficit is absorbing 124 percent of net private savings, as Stockman predicted," writes Paul Craig Roberts, "then the tooth fairy must have financed the strong expansion in business capital spending that has contributed three times more to GNP growth than is typical in postwar recoveries." Thus, throughout this recovery, the Wall Street bears, the pundits and the politicians who ridiculed the supply-sidertax s' been proven wrong. When the doomsayers said that last year's healthy economic growth rate would not hold up through 1983, the economy produced a Donald Lambro that says "play it safe" and reap the political rewards of a booming economy, or choose a more daring strategy. With the polls showing Reagan holding a advantage over Walter Mondale, the conventional wisdom being pushed in the West Wing is to sit on this seemingly insurmountable lead and say or do nothing to give Mondale an issue. But some of the party's younger bulls, such as Reps. Jack Kemp of New York and Newt Gingrich of Georgia, are urging the president not to "play it safe." They want him to seize the political offensive and offer new economic initiatives in his campaign proposals to help the poor and lead the nation to higher levels of economic growth that will further shrink the deficit. Chief among them: enactment of a simplified flat tax that would virtually eliminate federal income taxes for families on the bottom rung of the income scale, give new growth incentives to business and further expand job opportunities. believe that The supply-sider- s the president must capitalize now upon the success of his economic policies by showing how he can make the economy in a second term outperform 1983 and 1984. Which strategy Reagan follows may determine how well Mondale does in nt deficit going no higher than $177 billion. That's still horrendous, but it's $54 billion lower than originally predicted. cuts have consistently re- Still, by the end of 1963 the doomsayers were saying the recovery couldn't possibly continue at such levels through Even Stockman's revised estimate shows the economist the Treasury officials to study (worst-case- ) supply-sid- e of spected Wall Street investment firm of Morgan Stanley & Company admits, "We really did underestimate the strength of the economy." And Treasury Secretary Donald Regan is so and surprised impressed by the continuing economic surge that he has asked senior V- - jKS "Notice the poor muscle structure. |