c
Viewpoint
The Battalion Tuesday
Texas A&M University June 6, 1978
OSHA has to obey Constitution too
The U.S. Supreme Court had under considera
tion two important, competing values in a case
involving spot safety checks of employers’ prem
ises by agents of the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration. One is the Fourth
Amendment’s protection against unreasonable
search and seizures, and the other is the welfare
of workers exposed to potentially hazardous work
ing conditions.
Both requirements were met in a 5-3 decision
that nevertheless provoked a sharp rebuttal from
the minority. The majority held that warrantless
investigations violate the Fourth Amendment
but, on the other hand, the court said the gov
ernment, in obtaining warrants, would not have
to meet strict criminal law standards.
Writing for the majority. Justice Byron R.
White said that “probable cause in the criminal
law sense” is not necessary for such a warrant,
thus doing away with the need to produce “spe
cific evidence of an existing violation.” He also
suggested that warrants could be issued without
notice to property owners, but he argued that
employers’ constitutional rights would be pro
tected if OSHA obtained warrants based on “a
general administrative plan for enforcement of
the act .”
The dissenting justices maintained that the
Fourth Amendment did not prohibit the kind of
warrantless search conducted by OSHA, arid they
called the “new-fangled inspection warrant” pro
posed by the majority “essentially a formality”
without much worth. Yet this procedure will offer
some protection, we think, against the casual in
vasion of an employer’s privacy.
As White noted, “the privacy interest suffers
whether the government’s motivation is to inves
tigate violations of criminal laws or breaches of
other statutory or regulatory standards.”
The case arose when the owner of a Pocatello,
Ida., heating-and-plumbing shop refused to per
mit an inspector to enter the establishment.
When the agent returned with a court order, the
contractor, a John Birch Society member who
keeps a copy of the Bill of Rights on a wall of his
office, again refused, and sought an injunction
against further attempts.
The inspection program will continue, as it
must, in the interest of millions of workers, but
even benevolent government, if it becomes om
nipresent, can smother freedom. The impulse of
the Pocatello man to resist and to carry his resis
tance to the Supreme Court is an impulse on the
side of freedom.
The Los Angeles Times
Senate waiting game
Jimmy’s
By DAVID S. BRODER
WASHINGTON — The campaign
Jimmy Carter conducted for President in
1976 was famous for two four-letter words
and one three-letter phrase.
The four-letter words were “love,” or
“lust” in the Playboy version. The three-
letter phrase was ZBB, for zero-base
budgeting.
FROM PLATFORMS all across
America, Carter said that the budget
technique he had introduced to Georgia
would help “reduce large deficits and
therefore contribute to controlling infla
tion” when he brought it to Washington.
The purpose of ZBB is to force program
managers to examine all their outlays,
from the ground up, each year; to set
priorities for spending at any approved
budget level, and to weigh all programs
against each other. It would, Carter prom
ised, “require every program that spends
the taxpayers’ money to rectify itself annu
ally.”
It was duly launched when Carter came
to office and, despite some misgivings,
applied across the entire government in
preparing Carter’s first budget, the one he
submitted to Congress last January.
THE FIRST GRADES on that effort
are beginning to come in, and this particu
lar Carter reform is drawing a mixed re
port card.
In an unusually candid self-appraisal, is
sued by the White House last month, the
administration said ZBB was “off to a good
start” but was not without its own prob
lems.
According to the administration, ZBB
increased “management participation in
the budget process,” and achieved some
economies (even though the administra
tion was honest enough not to concoct a
dollar-savings figure). It also brought
about some small, but worthwhile shifts of
resources and personnel.
On the other hand, the White House
conceded, there was a big increase in
budgetary paperwork and serious prob
lems in applying ZBB to some major areas
of government.
NOW, TWO INDEPENDENT ap
praisals have come in by budget experts
outside the Carter administration. And
they tend to take a considerably more
skeptical view of what ZBB has accom
plished and can achieve.
Allen Schick of the Urban Institute and
Robert W. Hartman of the Brookings In
stitution say, in separate articles, that ZBB
never came to grips with the heart of the
budget process and may have impeded the
hard choices of basic direction which need
to be made.
Schick, writing in the Public Adminis-
phrase
tration Review, says “the new system was
speedily installed throughout the federal
bureaucracy,” but only because “it did not
really change the rules by which budget
ary decisions are made. It changed the
terminology of budgeting, but little
more.
IN A SIMILAR VEIN, Hartman, whose
critique is in Brookings’ new volume; “Set
ting National Priorities,” says that the new
budgeting technique “seems to have led to
little restructuring of the budget base,”
which was supposed to be its greatest ad
vantage over older methods.
“To the extent that zero-base budgeting
had any effect at all,” Hartman says, “it
was on low-level improvements in the op
eration of programs. But such a focus
comes at considerable cost.”
The cost, both experts say, is that a
managerial focus on budgetary detail tends
to divert energy and attention from the
big-picture decisions that must be made.
As Schick puts it, “a preoccupation with
the routines of operation drives out a con
sideration of program objectives and effec
tiveness.”
The White House response is that
greater economies and more significant
shifts of focus will result when ZBB is used
again, as a more familiar tool, in future
budgets. But Schick says that official op
timism is contradicted by experience at
the state level. The significant economies
of efficiency are “creamed off early, he
says, and the savings from administrative
improvements tend to diminish “as the
ZBB process itself becomes routinized. ”
HARTMAN NOTES that when Carter
himself wanted to make a significant shift
of direction — a^ with the energy, welfare,
urban and education programs *— he did
so “entirely outside the new budget pro
cedures.” These initiatives, he says, “were
not made to compete with other programs
in the way that an integrated budget re
view process requires.
“These developments, he concludes,
“raise the question of whether budgetary
decisions — once the crucible for setting
national priorities — will play a smaller
role in such policy-setting in the future.”
The criticism by these two experts does
not mean that ZBB is a failure. But it does
suggest that it will take more than this par
ticular technique for Carter to gain the
control of federal spending . He needs that
control to achieve his twin goals of reduc
ing budget deficits and reshaping budget
priorities to meet the real needs of the
1980s.
ZBB, like love, turns out to be less than
the magic formula for reshaping govern
ment.
(c) 1978, The Washington Post Co.
By IRA R. ALLEN
United Press International
WASHINGTON — The fierce debate
over whether to revise the nation’s basic
labor law may not be decided on its merits
but on how long the Senate is willing to
allow delaying tactics to go on.
The bill generally would expand the
rights of organized labor, especially by in
creasing opportunities for employees in
non-union shops to vote on whether they
want union representation.
Analysis
The debate has been fueled by millions
of dollars worth of publicity and lobbying
by the AFL-CIO, on one side, and the
Chamber of Commerce and its allies, on
the other.
It is clear a majority of the Senate would
now vote for the bill, although amend
ments might be necessary.
Less clear is whether or when propo
nents will be able to get the three-fifths
vote, or 60 members, necessary to limit
debate and choke off a filibuster that had
run nine days when the Senate broke for
its long Memorial Day holiday.
First attempt to invoke cloture will
come Wednesday and it seems likely to
fail.
Republican Leader Howard Baker has
said his profilibuster side has enough votes
to keep the talking going “for a long time.”
Last year, Democratic Leader Robert
Byrd made three tries to break a filibuster
blocking legislation providing federal
financing of Senate election campaigns,
and gave up.
This time, Byrd says he will try to break
the filibuster no matter how long it takes.
Accurate head counts at this point are
elusive, particularly because a vote against
cloture does not necessarily mean a vote
against the bill, nor is a vote to limit de
bate before a vote on the bill.
Take the case of Lawton Chiles, D-Fla.,
who opposes the bill as written. He might
vote for cloture anyway, a Chiles aide says,
“when the situation on the Senate floor
gets to where it’s repetitive and obstruc
tive.”
Conversely, some senators who favor
the bill might still vote against cloture be
cause they support the principle of unlim
ited debate. Howard Cannon, D-Nev., is
considered in that category.
There are others, like Edward Zorinsky,
D-Neb., whose cloture vote will depend
on what concessions they can get to make
the bill itself more acceptable.
“That’s why I’ve remained uncommitted
as to when I would vote for cloture,”
Zorinksy said. “I want to use my vote as a
trade-off.”
Finally, there are believed to be some
senators who favor the bill but will have to
vote against it because of homestate poli
tics. Some of them might vote for cloture
to help bring the bill to a vote, where it
might pass with the support of others.
Hanoi trying to get on U.S. good side
Vietnamese sending Nationalist Chinese home
By ALAN DAWSON
United Press International
BANGKOK, Thailand — Abandoned by
their government officials and denied exit
for three years, Nationalist Chinese are
unexpectedly being allowed to leave
communist-ruled Vietnam for Taiwan.
Diplomatic sources said there is no ap
parent reason for the sudden Vietnamese
decision to allow some of the 1,000 or
more Nationalist Chinese to leave Saigon.
But some believe it is part of a develop
ing new campaign by Hanoi to gain inter
national respect and establish full diploma
tic relations with the United States.
A slow trickle of Nationalist Chinese
who were trapped in Saigon was abruptly
ended about 18 months ago. Then last
month, Hanoi suddenly signalled it was
ready to again giant them permission to
leave.
The first planeload of 190 Nationalist
Chinese passport holders was flown to
Bangkok last week by charter airliner,then
transferred under tight security to a China
Air Lines plane for a secret flight to Taipei.
Although officials said those allowed to
leave were Vietnamese-Chinese, in fact
virtually all were citizens of the Taiwan
government.
Most officials in Vietnam believed the
Nationalist Chinese had the most exten
sive intelligence network in the Indochina
war zone of any foreign nation, including
the United States.
Commentary
Many of the Nationalist Chinese were in
sensitive positions in Saigon and the coun
tryside. Typical jobs included newspaper
editors, teachers in Cholon schools and ag
ricultural advisers.
Some were known to work actively with
pro-Taiwan militia groups, the most fa
mous of which was the so-called “Sea Swal
low” battalion deep in the Mekong Delta.
The Sea Swallows were formed by one Na
tionalist Chinese who later returned to
Taipei and now serves in the island gov
ernment’s legislature.
As the Vietnam war ended in 1975, the
Natonalist Chinese embassy was beseiged
by its citizens and Vietnamese seeking
help. But few citizens other than the em
bassy staff and a few key personnel were
helped.
Ambassador Hsu Shao-chang left
Vietnam on a special unannounced China
Air Lines flight April 26, four days before
the communist victory. That also was the
same day former President Nguyen Van
Thieu left Saigon for refuge in Taiwan.
Communist intelligence operatives
whoe ntered Saigon quickly targeted the
Nationalist Chinese community — then
estimated at about 3,000 — for special at
tention. Several, including at least three
journalists, were arrested and are believed
still in prison on charges of being intelli
gence agents.
Some Nationalist Chinese told friends in
Saigon they were bitter at their govern
ment for leaving them behind in Vietnam
and it is apparently for this reason Taipei
officials have refused to let any of the re
turnees see relatives or journalists.
Foreign diplomats in Bangkok think the
release of the Nationalist Chinese may
signal a fresh exit for foreigners still
trapped in Saigon. These include citizens
of the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand
and other countries of the region.
Vietnam may be sending a signal it in
tends to improve relations with nations of
the area on a pragmatic basis, some
sources said.
The ultimate goal of such campaign they
believe is to estalish full relations with the
United States.
Writing the editor
The Battalion welcomes letters to
the editor on any subject. However,
to be acceptable for publication
these letters must meet certain
criteria. They should:
V Not exceed 300 words or 1800
characters in length.
V Be neatly typed whenever
possible. Hand-written letters are
acceptable.
^ Include the author s name,
address and telephone number for
verification. Names will be withheld
on request.
Letters to the editor are printed
as a service to our readers. Publica
tion of a letter is never guaranteed.
The editorial staff reserves the right
to edit letters to remove grammati
cal errors and to avoid litigation.
Address letters to the editor to:
Letters to the Editor
The Battalion
Room 216
Reed McDonald Building
College Station, Texas 77843
Top of the News
Campus
Degree applications now taken
Texas A&M University students expecting to graduate this summer
must make a formal application for a degree byjune 16. A degree
application station will be in G. Rollie White Coliseum Wednesday
through Friday. The $8 graduation fee can be paid with other sum-
mer school fees.
State
Hill files antitrust charge
Attorney General John Hill filed an antitrust charge Monday in
Austin in a Travis County district court against a major distributor ol
Smith & Wesson handguns and ammunition. Hill said Dave’s House
of Guns Inc. of Dallas, a wholesale distributor, has restricted trade
and lessened competition since at least Jan. 1, 1975.
Texas City explosion victim dies
Joyce Taylor, a victim of last week’s Texas City refinery explosion,
died Monday from burns received in the accident, raising the death
toll to seven. Officials at the University of Texas Medical Brandi in
Galveston said Mrs. Taylor of Texas City died at 3 a.m. She was
admitted to the hospital with third-degree burns over 80 percent ol
her body following the explosion last Tuesday.
Vaccine field trials underway
Field trials are under way for a vaccine to protect Americans next
fall and winter from an expected outbreak of Russian influenza, fed
eral health officials say. Don Berreth, public information director for
the national Center for Disease Control, said the vaccine being tested
is a type that will offer protection against the Russian flu strain as well
as the A-Texas and B-Hong Kong varieties.
Earthquake shakes San Diego
Da
in
By FL
Battalio
'Two danc<
inner thea
eadline a
ntertainme
[M Univei
might tl
summer
uring ft
Jtband, “S
Students
0 m 8:30 p
Ion-student
[ion stam
lorn anc
and sof
ihe danc
jve outdc
of the d
Jdance wi
ieldhouse.
Ji^ednesdi
Is Christ
jieduled r
hpvv movf
ummer ses
’ exam p
An earthquake registering 4.4 on the Richter Scale rattled mostol
San Diego County Monday, but there have been no reports of dam
age or injury. The quake was centered 10 miles northeast of Mt,
Palomar, near the northern edge of the county, according to the
seismology department at California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. The San Diego Police Department and the county Sheriffs
Department reported numerous calls, but no damage.
Bess Truman undergoes tests
Former first lady Bess Truman underwent additional diagnostic
tests in Kansas City Monday, but officials at Research Medical Center
said it would be later this week before results of the tests were
available. Mrs. Truman, 93, has been listed in satisfactory condition
since she entered the hospital for the second time in six weeks last
Friday. A hospital spokesman said Monday’s testing included a blood
sugar test to determine if Mrs. Truman, the widow of president
Harry S. Truman, has kidney problems.
Kodak official blasts suit
A $75 million federal court suit brought last week by Fotomat Inc.
against Eastman Kodak Co. has no merit, a Kodak official said
Monday. The suit, filed in San Diego, Calif., accused Kodak of violat
ing the Sherman Antitrust Act and making overcharges of at least $25
million on Kodak products bought by Fotomat. The suit also alleged
Kodak used “unfair competitive advantages and “predatory actions
to keep Fotomat from manufacturing film.
Court okays televising of hearing into
^ben £
niversity
ome kin
nent, th(
Jns Flic
IFlick i
Irtmenl
Jjop whic
er idea” c
By
K'hich wa
i“WheJi (
i?”
I W/iaf d
lie visit
!?”
The trail
|ly happ<
Texas A<
Incoming
|entatioi
lei.
|During
campus
irents wi
red (pei
htter ten
JParents
■niliarize
manges tl
ters go by
i “How c
feades?”
question 1
kin, assi
Academic
1 His ans
The State Supreme Court in Oklahoma voted Monday to permit
the closed circuit televising of a preliminary hearing for Gene Leroy
Hart, charged with the sex slaying of three Girl Scouts. Supreme
Court Chief Justice Ralph Hodges confirmed it would be the first
time in state history a hearing was televised.
Engineers conducting experiments
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Monday it plans to
conduct experiments in an effort to stop the worst fish kill on record
in Missouri. Paul Barber, chief of the corps’ engineering division iri
Kansas City, said officials at the Waterways Experiment Station in
Vicksburg, Miss., began constructing models this weekend of the
Truman Dam and expect to begin testing by midweek. The fish kill is
occurring on the Osage River below the Truman Dam near Warsaw.
ERA ratification time doubled
A House subcommittee today narrowly approved a proposal to
double the length of time backers have to win ratification of the Equa
Rights Amendment. The House civil and constitutional rights su
committee voted 4-3 to approve the sevenyear extension of the 19
ratification deadline. The proposal now goes to the full Judiciary
Committee. It would extend the ratification period for the ERA un i
July 1, 1986. Backers of ERA now have until July 1, 1979, to win
ratification by 38 states.
World
Candidates clash over outcome
Liberal presidential candidate for Bogota, Colombia, Julio Cesar
Turbay today appeared to have won a narrow victory over Conserva
tive Belisario Betancur in Colombia’s presidential election, but both
men declared themselves the winners. Colombian soldiers put on
alert during the balloting Sunday continued to patrol the streets oi
Bogota today, but few pedestrians or cars were out, perhaps because
of the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the election.
Since h
ears ag<
lick has
op com
precision
many req
; But,’ h
iurement
years in t
T‘I still
version t
file Hagi
smile,
t But he
successh
metric ai
on machi
far small
jdiscern.
I Less t
spleted in
■cult em
months,
backlog
But tii
to these
~
Dl
5
Weather
Overcast skies this morning. Mostly cloudy today and tonight
with continued warm temperatures and high humidity. High
today mid-80s, low tonight low 70s. High tomorrow uppef
80’s. Winds from the Southeast at 6-15 mph. 50% chance oi
rain today, 60 % tonight and 30% on Wednesday.
The Battalion
Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the
editor or of the writer of the article and are not necessarily
those of the University administration or the Board of Re
gents. The Battalion is a non-profit, self-supporting
enterprise operated by students as a university and com
munity newspaper. Editorial policy is determined by the
editor.
LETTERS POLICY
Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words and are
subject to being cut to that length or less if longer. The
editorial staff reserves the right to edit such letters and does
not guarantee to publish any letter. Each letter must be
signed, show the address of the writer and list a telephone
number for verification.
Address correspondence to Letters to the Editor, The
Battalion, Room 216, Reed McDonald Building, College
Station, Texas 77843.
Represented nationally by National Educational Adver
tising Services, Inc., New York City, Chicago and Los
Angeles.
533 S‘
Mail subscriptions are $16.75 P er “fusing i* 1 ' 1 ,
school year; $35.00 per full year. Ad
nished on request. Address: The ’ y e%1 s "•
Reed McDonald Building, College ta ’ lujivety^
United Press International i8 enti
use for reproduction of all news dispa . -gjnrtfeh
Rights of reproduction of all other ma ^ u-
Second-Class postage paid at College
member
sss
\v*r.
The Battalion is published Monday through Friday from
t September through May except during exam and holiday
periods and the summer, when it is published on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays.
Editor " '
Sports Editor Roy
News Editor ' ..CO
City Editor
Campus Editor . • • P 1 ' 1
Photo Editor
Student Publications Board: B, ’}’ C ’ c ]}Jles
Joe Arredondo. Dr Gary Halter. nyectt*^
Dr. Clinton A. Phillips. Rebel «<«'•
Publications: Donald C. Johnson. ^
J