The class of '96: a congressional rogues' gallery.

1 DON YOUNG (R-AK)

Don Young, Alaska's only congressman, can't see the Capitol building from his desk, because an 11-foot grizzly bear skin blocks the view. There's also a skinned wolf on another wall and the mounted heads and racks of half a dozen ungulates and various other trophy animals he's shot. Trophy photos include pictures of Young with former Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush, as well as Spiro Agnew and Reagan Secretary of Interior James Watt.

In the heat of the environmental battles now taking place in Washington, Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt has described Don Young as an "alpha wolf." When he took over chairmanship of the House Natural Resources Committee from California Democrat George Miller in 1994, his first act was to drop the word "natural" from the committee's title. It was an abrupt about-face: Miller, now the minority leader on the committee, got an 85 rating from the League of Conservation Voters in 1995, while Young rated a zero.

While House Majority Whip (and former pest exterminator) Tom DeLay of Texas has been leading the Republicans' faltering drive for "regulatory reform" of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Superfund and various anti-pollution laws, Young, as chairman of the Resources Committee, has been fighting to open up the nation's public lands for what he calls "energy, hydro, fiber and minerals." Young is the driving force behind congressional attempts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, protect mining companies rights to procure public lands for $5 an acre under the 1872 Mining Law, open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, and increase logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the largest intact rainforest in North America.

"We create parks and refuges and wilderness areas, but they create no dollars for the American worker," charges Young. "Mining creates jobs, trees create jobs, farming creates jobs, and American factories create jobs."

Young, who calls environmentalists "a self-centered bunch, a waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual bunch of idiots [pursuing] a socialist agenda," is unabashed in the pursuit of polluter cash. He took $241,700 in political action committee (PAC) contributions in 1995, with most of the money coming from energy, paper, mining, tobacco, factory farming and various pollution interests. Only 20 percent of Young's $141,071 in individual contributions came from Alaskans.

Young does have glimmers of humility. "We can't do everything in two years," he admits. "We'll elect a good [Republican] president, do lots of good things...And bypass the preservationists who don't want anything, who believe man shouldn't be around, who believe man's a cancer upon the Earth."

* League of Conservation Voters (LCV) Rating, D; Citizen Action Superfund PAC Contributions (SPC), $36300; Citizen Fund Chemical Industry PAC Takers (CI), $11,300; Citizens Fund Top Anti-Environmental PAC Takers (CF), $34,800; USPIRG Polluter PAC Funds Index (PIRG), $165,750

2 TOM DELAY (R-TX)

DeLay, the House Majority Whip, is one of the most partisan members of the highly ideological 104th Congress. The tobacco-chewing former exterminator is known for his aggressive exercise of power in what is usually a low-key job. "DeLay twists extra hard," reports The New Republic. And he twists even harder on the environment, calling the EPA "the Gestapo of government," and adding that the agency "has been one of the major claw hooks that the government maintains on the backs of our constituents." DeLay's hatred of government is only exceeded by his reluctance to reform it. He's a major opponent of campaign finance reform, going so far as to give his favorite lobbyists space in House committee rooms.

* LCV, 0; SPC, $106,171; CI, $14,500; CF, $93,671; PIRG, $89,100.

3 NEWT GINGRICH (R-GA)

House Speaker Gingrich, never exactly a friend of the earth, drove home the last nail in his environmental coffin by proposing the Contract With America in the early days of the 104th Congress. Without actually even mentioning the environment by name, the Contract - if it had been fully enacted - would have proved devastating by gutting important regulations on air and water pollution, toxic waste and abuse of public lands. But after the Republicans' own polls showed voters trusting Democrats over Republicans two to one on environmental matters, Gingrich admitted that the party had "taken a beating" on the issue. "We clearly are strategically out of position on the environment," he said. But the "born again" Gingrich - whose legally questionable GOPAC did much to install the 104th Congress' anti-environmental freshman class - doesn't look like much of an improvement. Though he now seeks photo opportunities getting cuddly with the animals at Zoo Atlanta, Gingrich still supports major cuts in the Interior Department budget, and recently named anti-Endangered Species Act zealot Richard Pombo (see main story) to co-chair the House Republican task force on the environment.

* LCV, 13(*); SPC, $95,775; CI, $12,000; CF, $90,275; PIRG, $161,125.

4 ROBERT LIVINGSTON (R-LA)

In 1995, Livingston, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. cast the deciding vote to end a highly popular ban on offshore oil drilling in federal waters off the California coast. The reason: the ban was restricting the search for new oil, and Louisiana is a pillar of the oil industry. The state of California has its own offshore oil ban, but as California junior Senator Barbara Boxer points out, "Clearly, it does a state no good to protect its own waters, only to have drilling [in federal waters] jeopardizing the entire state's coastline." Livingston apparently became so personally involved in the oil-drilling debate that he took the highly unusual step of laying down his moderator's gavel and, in the words of The Los Angeles Times, "vigorously opposing the ban." With the ban lifted, the offshore leasing process will begin for tracts that can contain as much as 10 billion eminently spillable gallons of oil.

* LCV, 0; SPC, $86,950; CI, $8,000; CF, $63,500, PIRG, $80,750.

5 THOMAS BLILEY (R-VA)

Bliley, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, took time out of his busy schedule last April to attack...Earth Day! The 26-year-old environmental event isn't "a non-partisan celebration, but rather a political event aimed at Election Day," he said. One of Bliley's first acts after taking over the chairmanship of the House's health and environment subcommittee from California Democrat Henry Waxman was to lift the smoking ban. Now, reports Time, "congressional aides gleefully flick their ashes into a glass ashtray placed atop Waxman's picture."

* LCV, 0; SPC, $82,000; CI, $13,560, CF, $73,564; PIRG, $180,355.

6 GREG LAUGHLIN (R-TX)

Laughlin is no longer polluting the halls of Congress. After the four-term Democrat switched to the Republican Party in 1995, the voters turned him out in a primary runoff last April. "You wake up one day and say, 'I am in the wrong political party,'" Laughlin said in making his announcement, adding that what "crystallized" it for him was "the liberal leadership running roughshod over conservative principles." Laughlin - like another party switcher, Billy Tauzin (see below) - was apparently set off by an appeal from the party to vote affirmatively on protecting wetlands. And wetlands protections, he said, interfere with private property rights.

* LCV, 0; SPC, $68, 176; CI, $10,500; PIRG, $86,700.

7 RICHARD GEPHARDT (D-MO)

As the House Democratic leader, Gephardt wields considerable power, and that's what makes him eligible for large piles of dirty money. Gephardt appears as the only Democrat on any number of polluter cash lists. Although his environmental voting record isn't too bad, Gephardt has the gall to use his position to chide others for taking anti-environmental cash. "The only thing green about today's Republican Party is the money they're raking in from corporate polluters," he said at a news conference in February.

* LCV, 77; SPC, $65,500; CI, $13,500; CF, $73,000; PIRG, $215,250.

8 JOE BARTON (R-TX)

Barton, chairman of the House Commerce subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, has made it a personal crusade to embarrass Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary over the expensive trade missions she took and consultants she hired. Fair enough. But while he's got oversight on the mind, Barton might want to took at his own congressional district in Texas which, as Newsday reports, is "strangely shaped" to embrace prosperous subdivisions and wealthy suburbs, while avoiding poor areas. Even a Barton aide calls the district "white apartheid." But perhaps Barton is just confused. During the 1992 campaign, he went up to his own wife at a fundraiser and said, "I'm Joe Barton and I'm running for Congress."

* LCV, 0; SPC, $63,344; CI, $13,750; CF, $51,000; PIRG, $158,382.

9 BUD SHUSTER (R-PA)

Shuster, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, stands out in a strongly anti-environmental field for writing what greens have called the "Dirty Water Act." Shuster's revisions to the 1972 Clean Water Act (which passed the House last year) have been universally reviled for rolling back protections and granting waivers and exemptions to industry. "Overzealous wetland legislation has turned every mud puddle into a wetland," Shuster declared, shortly before Greenpeace activists distributed bottles of filthy water labeled "Shuster Springwater" around the committee room. But despite his determination to pollute the nation's water, Shuster doesn't want the folks at home to suffer. The congressman, legendary for bringing home the political pork, slipped a provision into the water bill appropriating $10 million to clean up his own districts Raystown Lake.

* LCV, 0; SPC, $62,500; CI, $9,000; CF, $52,500; PIRG, $94,900.

10 BILL PAXON (R-NY)

In 1994, when the House Sub-committee on Health and the Environment took up a bill aimed at protecting non-smokers from secondhand smoke, Paxon was in the forefront - opposing it. After hearing that the EPA had classified cigarette smoke as a "class A carcinogen," Paxon, who wants the federal government off people's backs, declared, "We shouldn't be creating a whole new smoke police at the national level." In de fending legislation he did like, the anti-environmental "unfunded mandates" bill, Paxon made it plain that he considers government regulation to have gone too far. "The environmental laws and the thrust of them in the 1960s and 1970s are a good idea, but there are problems when interpretation and the screw-tightening are superimposed on people who are struggling at best," Paxon said. "You've got a competition between state and federal regulators on who can be the toughest and meanest."

* LCV, 0; SPC, $61,506; CI, $6,500; CF, $32,006; PIRG, $89,648.

11 W.J. 'BILLY' TAUZIN (R-LA)

Like Laughlin, Tauzin switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party in 1995. Unfortunately, Tauzin is still in office. A loose cannon who delights in attacking environmentalists in coarse language, the oil state congressman is a prime House author of "takings" legislation designed to protect property owners from the enforcement of environmental laws. In 1995, Tauzin managed to attach a takings amendment to the successful California Desert Protection Act, guaranteeing that property owners in that state would get compensated if endangered species were found on their land. And Tauzin has also introduced a sweeping property-rights bill that would define nearly any restriction under the Endangered Species Act as a "taking."

* LCV, 0; SPC, $61,250; CI, $14,000; CF, $51,450; PIRG, $184,696.

12 DICK ARMEY (R-TX)

House Majority Leader Armey is "about as anti-regulation as they come," writes The New Republic. And, amazingly enough, he was even worse before being elevated to one of the most powerful positions in the House of Representatives. "This guy makes Newt Gingrich look like a fuzzy, cuddly bear," writes Molly Ivins in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, noting that he's called for abolishing Social Security. Even Armey admits he "risked being labeled a bomb-thrower, a loose cannon." But it was the "improved" Armey who told Hillary Clinton to her face that "reports of your charm are overstated" and called his colleague Barney Frank "Barney Fag."

* LCV, 0; SPC, $54,000; CI, (N/A); CF, $45,550; PIRG, $64,250.

* House Speakers vote only at their own discretion; Gingrich's last LCV rating was for the 1993-1994 congressional session.

Following the Money Train

The 12 Congressmen on this list are kept in place by large and regular infusions of cash from the corporate PACs and wealthy individuals whose interests they serve. Tracking their voting records isn't enough; you have to follow the money trail, too. Thanks to diligent record-keeping by a variety of environmental organizations, we're able to report just how much tainted cash flows to this "Dirty Dozen," and the voting pattern that results.

The League of Conservation Voters "National Environmental Scorecard" (LCV) rates House members on their votes on key environmental bills in the first session of the 104th Congress. Citizen Action ranked congressmen who took PAC funds from corporations affected by the federal Superfund in 1995. Citizens Fund tallied House recipients of at least $5,000 from PACs opposed to health and environmental regulations between January 1, 1995 and July 31, 1995 (July incomplete). It also charted the Top 25 House recipients of chemical industry PAC money in the same period. USPIRG studied the first session of the 104th Congress for funds taken from PACs relating to timber, grazing, mining, sugar, coal and other related industries.

-J.M.