Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Despite its best efforts, Congress couldn’t budge Carter. He may have been naive, but he was adamant. Seeing this, Congress, as the New Republic remarked, began “breaking out the high-minded rhetoric that Congressmen reserve for their grubbiest and most cynical undertakings.” Majority leader Jim Wright of Texas, for example, wrote a letter to his colleagues urging them “to help defend the Constitutional prerogative of Congress. The White House,” Wright said, “in trying to dictate [budgetary] line items, is reaching for powers never granted any Administration by Congress.” (This was the same Jim Wright who was one of the key backers of the constitutionally dubious Gulf of Tonkin resolution; it was the same Jim Wright who, in defiance of his own constituents—who had decisively rejected a bond issue to help finance the proposed Trinity River Project—kept sticking money for it back into the public-works appropriations bills.) Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine picked up Wright’s Imperial Presidency line in the Senate—the same Edmund Muskie who was pushing the Corps’ $800 million Dickey-Lincoln Dam on the St. John River even as it was opposed by both the president and minority leader of the Maine senate, by Maine’s two U.S. Representatives, by most of the local newspapers, and, according to several opinion polls, by a majority of the people in the state. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said, “A project is not ‘pork barrel’ to someone who has to shovel black mud . . . or see hi...