Coal Sore: a Veto Showdown?

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Grave constitutional questions are sometimes posed by less than nation-shaking issues. Case in point: the first test of the scope of the Supreme Court's June ruling against the so-called legislative veto (Immigration and Naturalization I Service vs. Chad ha) is being raised by an anemic auction | of coal leases.

i Interior Secretary James Watt has been trying to sell frights to mine on federally controlled land. Environmentalists and some Western Governors and Democrats contend he will spur the mining of coal that the nation does not now need, at giveaway prices. On Aug. 3, a House committee voted to order Watt not to hold a sale of mining rights scheduled for last week. Under federal law, its vote should have been controlling. But the Supreme Court in June declared unconstitutional the procedure under which Congress delegates authority to the Executive Branch to perform certain acts while reserving the option to later overrule the Executive. The committee protested that it had ordered Watt not to cancel the sale but only to delay it. Watt said even that action was unconstitutional.

The issue should be settled by the federal courts. Meanwhile, the Interior Secretary's determination to plunge ahead with the coal-lease sales program is raising a political storm; in the West, the disposition of the enormous amounts of coal that lie under federal land is an emotional issue. Ironically, though, when Watt last week put up for sale the rights to mine land containing 543 million tons of coal, primarily in North Dakota, he received bids covering only 115 million tons.