Nick Rahall Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

The State’s Washington Delegation Has Changed: What It Means

Curtis Tate spoke with Sam Workman, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, about what the changes mean for the state.

A lot has changed in West Virginia’s congressional delegation since the election. Sen. Joe Manchin retired and former Gov. Jim Justice took his place. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito moved up in seniority. And former state Treasurer Riley Moore began his first term in the House of Representatives.

Curtis Tate spoke with Sam Workman, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, about what the changes mean for the state.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tate: I spoke to former Congressman Nick Rahall recently. When he was elected in 1976, West Virginia had two very powerful and senior senators and six members of the House. Hasn’t the state’s influence diminished in Washington since?

Workman: You can’t lose senators like (Robert) Byrd, (Jay) Rockefeller and now Manchin over the course of not a very long time in political terms, institutional terms, and not have slightly diminished power, in the delegation. And that diminishment comes along sort of two dimensions. The first is we’re replacing senior senators. It’s not so much that there’s a step down from Manchin to Capito. It’s more just that we have two members of our delegation, Moore and Justice, who are new members. And new members, of course, have to sort of work their way up and gain the expertise necessary for the committees they’re on. That’s less a constraint on Justice, more so on on Riley Moore, just because of the committees they’ve been appointed to.

But there’s also another dimension that is at play since Representative Rahall was in office, and that is that in both chambers, the leadership, relative to the committees, controls a lot more in the modern Congress. Used to be that lots of things were delegated to subcommittees, and in particular, subcommittee chairs had a lot of power, and that’s a little less so now. Especially in the Republican Party, the leadership really sets the agenda in a much more hard way for the caucus. Now, the member of our delegation that looms large here is Senator Capito, because she obviously has climbed the ranks within the Republican leadership. She is the committee chair for policy for the Republicans, so that’s a big deal. So while the delegation as a whole probably has less power than some of the past delegations, certainly she has a tremendous amount of power.

Tate: Rahall had a very active first two terms, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Carter signed a lot of legislation he supported. Do you think we could expect the same from Riley Moore?

Workman: The thing we have to have to remember, too, when we’re talking about our delegation, is the tremendous political change that’s occurred in the state in my lifetime, certainly since Representative Rahall was in office. When we think about legislative success, there’s a fundamental asymmetry that should at least guide the broad outlines of our thinking on that. And it involves the fact that typically, Democrats see a very active, even proactive role for government involvement in an entire range of issues that are not only important in the state, but nationally, Republicans do not. They see themselves as sort of maintaining local control, putting the brakes on government, and that fundamental asymmetry alters what we would probably consider to be legislative success.

Tate: A lot of the work of members of Congress does involve constituent services. Wouldn’t someone like Moore get involved if, say, a veteran in the Eastern Panhandle needed help with VA benefits?

Workman: I have every expectation that his office would get involved. I don’t see a big difference in the parties in terms of basic levels of constituent assistance, in terms of service, government, goods and products and all of that sort of stuff. I think it’s important to remember that our state is unique in that the Republican delegation here has historically, at least so far, supported many broad based things to improve the economy here. And so I don’t see any huge difference in terms of constituency service for many of these things. Riley Moore has deep roots in the state. He understands his family, understands has had deep roots here for a long time, and understands sort of the plight of many West Virginians, and if we’re talking about the issue of veterans, especially veterans, I think that will just be par for the course as we move forward.

Tate: Can Justice carve out a meaningful role in the Senate when he’s near the bottom in seniority?

Workman: The reality is, for a freshman senator, it’s pretty tough. I will note, though, that he appears to be on the Energy Committee and Agriculture Committee. So those are issues that he has dealt with for a lifetime. It’s where his businesses are. His entrepreneurship has been located in those issues substantively. That is some indication that at least he can have a say on issues that are important, not just to him personally, but the state.

I would also note that it’s hard to handicap Senator Justice’s influence, because, as we know, he is a big buddy of President Trump. I think that alone probably lends him a bit more influence than the average senator would have. They know each other, their families know each other, and there’s a long relationship there. It’s not like he was on President Trump’s radar just this year. He was a prominent figure in Trump’s first administration. I think anyone expecting the similar level of influence we would for, say, an average freshman, that’s probably not the case for Senator Justice, but we have to wait and see how he makes use of that relationship in terms of being a senator, and the extent to which he does.

Tate: Would Justice’s or Capito’s influence wane if the White House changes parties in 2028?

Workman: Certainly it does and more so for Senator Justice than for Senator Capito. I only say that because Senator Capito has been around for a while now and has worked her way up the ranks of the party. She played a prominent role in President Biden’s administration, in terms of being there. Just think about the number of times we saw her at the podium with Senator (Mitch) McConnell, representing the Republican leadership. So it does matter. I think it matters disproportionately for Senator Justice. Senator Capito has been in politics a while. Senator Justice, he’s always sort of forged his own brand of doing the job of a politician. Who’s to say what the future holds there, and whether those folks would stick around for another Democratic presidential administration? They might, but I don’t think we know anything about that.

Former Congressman Nick Rahall Remembers Working With President Carter

Curtis Tate spoke with Rahall about his interactions with Carter during and after his presidency.

In November 1976, Nick Rahall was elected to his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives the same night as Jimmy Carter won the White House. Carter died in December at age 100, and Thursday is a national day of mourning for the 39th president.

Curtis Tate spoke with Rahall about his interactions with Carter during and after his presidency.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tate: What’s an issue you worked on with President Carter during your first term?

Rahall: In my first term in Congress, it was early April 1977, devastating floods hit southern West Virginia. Just about the entire southern part of the state was inundated with once-in-100-year type of flooding. Homes were destroyed, businesses were destroyed. I was able to get in via canoe into some of those deep southern counties and view the destruction and help shovel out mud. It took a while before federal and state assistance was even able to get in, much less provide the monies and rebuilding that was necessary. I received, needless to say, hundreds of letters from constituents pleading for help.

I sought a meeting with President Carter. He granted that meeting in the Oval Office, and I took those letters, and I had pictures of me laying them out on his desk and showing him how people were in desperate need of help. Small businesses that had been crushed, and in those days, interest rates were exorbitantly high. They were close to 20%, if not higher. So I introduced a bill and told President Carter about it to lower the Small Business Disaster Loan rates to 3%. I believe it was maybe 2%. Anyway, he pledged to get behind it, help me on it, and we got that passed in the Congress. And I have pictures of him signing into law with me standing behind him. Numerous disaster declarations, the delivery of FEMA money to the people of southern West Virginia enabled the southern part to rebuild after those devastating floods.

Tate: You had a role in creating the 1977 mine reclamation law. Can you tell us about that?

Rahall: That came out of the committee on which I served, which in those days was called Interior and Insular Affairs. Today it’s called Natural Resources, which I, in later years, became chairman of. But as a freshman member of Congress in 1977, then-Speaker Tip O’Neill appointed me as a conferee, which was unheard of in those days, for a freshman member of Congress to get on the conference committee that writes the final version of legislation. And I got on that conference committee. I had previously, early in that year, invited (Congressman) Mo Udall and several environmental people into southern West Virginia to see what an effective job our industry was doing at the time, reclaiming the land after strip mining. And so we enacted the federal Surface Mining Reclamation Control Act of 1977 that required operators to return the land to the approximate original contour and set up other environmentally sound mining practices.

As a result, we did not outlaw strip mining completely, as many an environmental community wanted to do in those days. So we compromised. We reached a compromise, and when President Carter signed that bill into law in the Rose Garden in August of 1977, I was standing behind him, and on one side of me stood the Sierra Club and the environmental community, and on the other side of me stood the West Virginia mining industry. Both sides supported that federal surface mining law. That’s unheard of today to find the coal industry and the environmental community agreeing on the same piece of legislation.

Tate: Before the New River Gorge became a national park, it was a national river. Again, you were involved.

Rahall: Yes, again, it was my legislation in 1977 to protect the New River, to make it a National River. President Carter signed that into law. That was the first step we did in what has been a long and certainly victorious journey ever since, leading to what today is called the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve that has really put southern West Virginia on the map, and has brought tourists from all over the country, all over the world, into southern West Virginia, and it has been a true success story.

Tate: You said West Virginia was one of a few states to support President Carter’s re-election. Since then, have Democrats changed, or has West Virginia changed?

Rahall: Well, I would say Democrats were different back then. We were much more to the ground, should I say on, on the core values that West Virginians stand for, and that is protecting the rights of working men and women, providing for their benefit and for their families’ benefit when they’re laid off work through no fault of their own, protecting our coal miners health and safety. We were able to do that, in my opinion, as a Democratic Party to a much greater degree in those days than has been true today, and certainly the Democratic Party was in the forefront of those efforts back then. Today, the national Democratic Party has truly forgotten about some of those core worker values that our Democratic Party in West Virginia stands for.

Tate: President Carter came to the state many times. Were you with him on those visits?

Rahall: He would come into West Virginia and visit with our people. I was there to greet him at every stop we had at that time. Senator Robert Byrd was the majority leader in the United States Senate. Jennings Randolph was in the United States Senate, also later, of course, to be succeeded by Senator (Jay) Rockefeller. But we had a very strong Democratic delegation. We were all Democrats in the House of Representatives. In those days, West Virginia was a Democratic state, and Jimmy Carter always appreciated that, and he appreciated the fact that he knew the struggles, the dreams, the work value of small town America, of rural communities that struggle each day to feed their families and that have a real work ethic at the core of themselves, that are moral, decent, upstanding people, and that’s what Jimmy Carter represented, his moral, his decency, his work ethic, were above reproach.

Tate: Is there any other memory you’d like to share?

Rahall: I do recall Thanksgiving weekend of 1979, it would have been leading up to the 1980 primaries, getting a call in my home in Beckley from Senator Ted Kennedy. He was about to announce that he was going to challenge President Carter in the primaries, Democratic primaries coming up in 1980. He reminisced about all that West Virginia meant to the Kennedy family. It helped to elect his brother, John F. Kennedy, to the White House. I listened to him for a while, and I said, ‘I salute you and the Kennedy family for what you’ve done for West Virginia, but I have to tell you, Senator, I’m going to stick with President Carter in the primaries next year.’

There was silence for a while, then he came back on and said, ‘Wow, Nick. I got to thank you.’ And I was a little stunned, and I said, ‘Sir?’ And he said, ‘I got to thank you for your honesty. There’s not many people to be as honest as you are and tell me exactly where you stand.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s it, Senator, I have to support President Carter.’ And I did. Carter somehow found out about that, and never forgot it, and had me down to the White House quite often for personal visits, including watching movies in the White House and and, yeah, we became pretty good friends.

Accessing Reproductive Care And Remembering President Carter, This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, what the past can teach advocates about providing access to reproductive care and remembering President Jimmy Carter.

On this West Virginia Morning, legislative agendas for upcoming sessions show lawmakers in some states determined to tighten abortion restrictions. The next episode of Us & Them speaks with abortion rights advocates focused on providing access to reproductive care — and some are looking back at efforts from half a century ago.

And today is a national day of mourning for 39th president Jimmy Carter. Curtis Tate spoke with former U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall about his interactions with President Carter during and after his presidency.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University and Marshall University School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Maria Young produced this episode.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning

History Center Opens Some Papers of Former Rep. Rahall

Records and photographs from the papers of former U.S. Rep. Nick Joe Rahall II have been opened for research at West Virginia University Libraries’ West Virginia & Regional History Center.

Rahall won the 1976 contest for West Virginia’s Fourth Congressional District seat and was re-elected 18 times. He is the state’s longest-serving congressman.

The university said in a news release the materials in Rahall’s collection document his contributions to national policy and state projects.

The opened materials are mostly from press files and include speeches, press releases and newspaper clippings from throughout his tenure.

Many of the photographs have been made available online at http://rahall.lib.wvu.edu.

Rahall donated his papers to WVU Libraries in 2015.

Rahall to Donate Papers to WVU

Former U.S. Nick Rahall is donating 2,000 boxes of documents from his congressional career to West Virginia University.

The papers include testimony, speeches, news releases and other documents. Rahall represented southern West Virginia for 19 terms in the U.S. House, from 1977 to 2015.

WVU Beckley and WVU Tech campus president Carolyn Long says in a news release that Rahall’s papers will offer students a unique look inside the life of a congressman who served for nearly four decades.

To further utilize Rahall’s papers, WVU said it will promote partnerships with Marshall and Concord universities, the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies and the West Virginia State Archives.

A ribbon cutting and celebration is scheduled for Oct. 3 in Beckley to commemorate Rahall’s donation of his papers.

Rockefeller Introduces Black Lung Legislation

Senator Jay Rockefeller co-sponsored legislation to address barriers and delays miners face when seeking benefits under the Black Lung Benefits Program.

The Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act of 2014 was introduced by Rockefeller and Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania. Senators Joe Manchin as well as Representatives Nick Rahall co-sponsored the bill.

It would require full medical disclosures be made available to all parties, provide miners to better legal representation, and create a pilot program to provide chest x-ray diagnoses—among other things.

In a press release Rockefeller said the bill addresses systematic barriers that many miners face when applying for and litigating claims under the current Black Lung program.