The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

BicentenniAL foLLies 147
congressmen—Don Bonker, Jack Cunningham and Pritchard—Magnuson
sent a bipartisan congressional torpedo into Dixy’s hull in the fall of 1977.
Twenty-four hours after he introduced it, Congress passed an amendment
to the Marine Mammal Protection Act that barred federal approval
for expansion of Cherry Point or any other oil port in Washington east of
Port Angeles on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the gateway to Puget Sound.
President Carter immediately signed it into law.
Later that month, Gorton went before the U.S. Supreme Court to defend
the state law that prohibited oil tankers of more than 125,000 deadweight
tons from entering Puget Sound. The law was struck down in
federal District Court after a lawsuit by Atlantic Richfield, which operated
the refinery at Cherry Point. Gorton told the justices that without the
ability to regulate supertanker traffic, the state’s ability to protect Puget
Sound from a disastrous oil spill would be dramatically compromised.
Dicks, who was on hand for the arguments, praised Gorton’s performance
and predicted a victory for the state.
Four months later, the high court handed down a decision that was a
mixed bag for Washington. Gorton did better than he had expected. The
court held that since Congress had already mandated uniform design
standards for oil tankers, the state law mandating higher and different
standards and banning supertankers from Puget Sound violated the federal
Supremacy Clause. However, the state’s tug-escort requirements violated
neither the Commerce Clause nor the federal government’s attempt
to achieve international agreement on regulation of tanker design. The
lower court had also over-reached in entirely invalidating the state’s prerogative
to impose pilotage requirements on vessels entering and leaving
its ports.
The upshot of the Magnuson Amendment has been to limit the size of
tankers that transit Puget Sound. While not super, they carry more oil
than the Exxon Valdez spilled and they still make hundreds of trips a year
through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. 15
LAteR in his cAReeR Gorton’s environmental record would be characterized
as odious. Critics rarely acknowledge his role in establishing
the state Department of Ecology, his efforts to protect Puget Sound or his
intervention in concert with Magnuson to prevent its magnificent killer
whales from becoming circus animals condemned to doing trained-seal
tricks in tanks. Ralph Munro, Washington’s former longtime secretary
of state, maintains that Gorton is “the absolute hero” of that story, aided
by the P-I’s ace Olympia reporter, Mike Layton, who stoked the outrage.