Lawmakers Create Instant Loopholes With Private Bills : Legislation: Congress frowns on private bills because they can establish national precedents and appear to favor individual constituents.

WASHINGTON —  Tomas Patag, a Philippine-born U.S. citizen and longtime Glendale resident, had a problem that threatened to keep his family apart. The Immigration and Naturalization Service said his adopted son could not remain in the United States permanently.

Patag and his wife had raised Pablo Cruz Patag after his parents died when he was a boy, but they did not legally adopt him until he was 21. Under U.S. immigration law, a person must be adopted by the age of 14 to receive preferential status as a family member.

When Pablo was a teen-ager, his adoptive parents emigrated to the United States, but they were unable to bring the entire family with them. Pablo, now 30, made the trip in 1984. He arrived with a visitor’s visa, stayed on as a student and was hired, temporarily, as a computer specialist in Los Angeles.

But permanent residency status and eventual citizenship remained beyond his reach.

Distraught, the family turned to Rep. Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale), who introduced a bill to allow Patag to apply for permanent residency status. The measure, which identifies Patag by name and applies to no other immigrants, passed the House earlier this month and is pending in the Senate.

“His whole family was here, and they were as much his family as if he was born into it, and they were all becoming citizens and he was left out in the cold,” Moorhead said. “I think it’s a very justified situation.”

Moorhead’s defensiveness is understandable. Such so-called private bills, a sensitive legislative topic that rarely receives public attention, are frowned upon by Congress.

Case-by-case lawmaking--which often deals with immigration issues, but can run the gamut from tax breaks to government employee benefits--is disfavored by its very nature.

That is because no matter how heart-rending a constituent’s circumstances, private bills establish instant legal loopholes for individuals. They may set national precedents as well, albeit inadvertently. And they can create at least the appearance of preferential treatment for favored constituents.

“If we do it for you, why shouldn’t we do it for anybody else?” observed an aide of a San Fernando Valley lawmaker. “If the same circumstance arises in another case, either you’ve set a precedent or you’re engaging in discrimination.”

Historically, such measures were useful for taking care of everything from sailing vessel licenses to expunging erroneous charges from Civil War military records. But today they are a vanishing vestige of a time when federal regulatory agencies had far less authority to resolve claims against the government and to rectify immigration inequities on their own.

Valley-area Democratic and Republican lawmakers were quick to point out in recent interviews that they rarely introduce such measures. Most have introduced only a few private bills in the past five years.

These included bids to accelerate the granting of citizenship for immigrant athletes seeking to represent the United States in the 1988 Olympics; waiving the statute of limitations to sue the government for serious personal injuries and awarding a patent to a man who claims he’s invented a perpetual motion machine.

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) said he has not sponsored any private bills in nearly three years in Congress, infuriating at least one constituent who was seeking such redress.

“In most cases, there are less extreme ways of dealing with the issues,” Gallegly said. “This approach can be an abuse of your power.”

Congress has taken steps to minimize such abuses. A system of checks--including the need for unanimity in the House--has made it more difficult in recent years to enact a private bill.

In the 1987-88 session of Congress, only 48 private bills were signed into law. This contrasts with a post-World War II peak of 1,103 in 1949-50. The number of public bills, which deal with broader issues, also has declined, but not so dramatically: 713 in the last Congress, compared with a postwar high of 1,028 in 1955-56.

The major reason for the decline in private bills is that “a lot of these were claims against the federal government,” said Roger H. Davidson, a political scientist at the University of Maryland. “Little by little, Congress changed the laws to allow executive agencies to settle these claims.”

And on immigration matters, the INS no longer automatically postpones a deportation when a private bill is introduced, a practice that spawned abuse of the system to perpetuate such delays in the 1960s, said Richard S. Beth, a legislative specialist at the Congressional Research Service. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 also gave the INS more flexibility to resolve conflicts administratively.

In the House, most private bills are sent to one of two subcommittees of the Judiciary Committee, where they are considered once a month on a special private calendar. The bills must meet two overriding standards to advance, committee aides say: The case must have merit, and all administrative channels must be exhausted.

Unlike public bills, which require a simple majority vote to send them to full committees and, from there, to the House floor, a single opposition vote will stall a private bill. The same rule applies when a private bill reaches the floor; any one of the House’s 435 representatives can, in effect, veto it with a “nay” vote that will return it to the Judiciary Committee.

As a safeguard, the House Speaker and minority leader each appoints three members of his respective party to serve as official “objectors.” Their staffs review the several hundred private bills introduced each legislative session as their party’s private bill watchdogs.

“Private laws are very easy to introduce and very difficult to get passed,” said Gene Smith, administrative assistant to Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City). “No one should be deceived into thinking that because a private bill has been introduced on their behalf” it will become law.

Given the need for broad consensus, congressional researcher Beth said numerous sensitive areas rarely get to the President’s desk as private legislation.

“Cases involving medical personnel, naturalization, marriage, adoption, homosexuality and crimes, especially involving drugs, have few favorable precedents,” Beth wrote in a study he published on private bills.

In 1987, lawmakers introduced a spate of bills seeking to grant U.S. citizenship to various athletes aspiring to compete in the Olympic Games. Few passed.

Among Valley members, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) sponsored one for Marina Kunyavsky, a teen-age rhythmic gymnast from the Soviet Union who had relocated to Los Angeles; Moorhead sought one for highly rated Armenian wrestler Gagik Barseghian, who had resettled in Glendale.

In both instances, the athletes had not completed the five-year waiting period in the United States required for citizenship. Waxman’s bill passed, but Kunyavsky narrowly missed making the U.S. team; Moorhead’s measure passed the House but not the Senate.

Tennis star Ivan Lendl, a native of Czechoslovakia, garnered considerable publicity when he too sought accelerated U.S. citizenship so he could play for the United States in the Olympics and the 1988 Davis Cup competition. The measure did not pass.

Private legislation also became a public issue when Congress decided to compensate the families of individuals who suffered from misguided government experiments with LSD in the 1950s. In 1976, for instance, a private bill awarded $750,000 to the family of Dr. Frank R. Olson, who committed suicide after the CIA gave him the hallucinogen.

Usually, however, the subjects of the bills are more obscure. Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ojai) was one of at least six lawmakers who unsuccessfully sponsored a bill that would have directed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to consider the application of Joseph W. Newman, who claimed he has invented a perpetual motion machine.

The agency would not consider Newman’s invention because it contends there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine that produces more energy than it consumes, said John Doherty, Lagomarsino’s senior aide. He said Newman has become something of a cause celebre among inventors.

Lagomarsino said he heard about Newman from constituents and never has spoken to the inventor, who does not live in his district.

“If he did, we’d know more about it,” Lagomarsino said. “I had quite a few constituents who wrote to me to say he ought to be allowed to make his case.”

Berman also carried a private bill for an individual from outside his East Valley district. The law, which passed last year, extends the statute of limitations to permit Paulette Mendes-Silva to sue the government.

Mendes-Silva was a government interpreter in 1963 when she needed inoculations against smallpox and yellow fever for an international conference in India.

On the day she received the smallpox vaccination, she went to the U.S. Public Health Service for the yellow fever inoculation. She contends the nurse failed to ask her, as she should have, whether Mendes-Silva had received any other inoculations recently. The two inoculations should not be given within a month of each other.

Within days, Mendes-Silva contracted post-vaccinal encephalitis. She has suffered partial paralysis, severe muscle atrophy, impaired vision and balance, and has needed constant medical care ever since.

She did not initially seek legal redress for a variety of reasons, according to Berman.

Government officials discouraged her from doing so, including then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was contacted by a mutual friend. As a French citizen, she was unfamiliar with her legal options. Finally, she was severely incapacitated, and her husband, who initially went to bat for her, left her and her son.

Berman’s bill does not prejudge Mendes-Silva’s case but, 26 years later, reopens the option for her to seek redress in court.

He said the woman’s plight meets his criteria for pursuing a private bill, one of three he has introduced in seven years.

“The inequity is glaring,” he said. “There’s no other meaningful alternative, and it is the kind of case that would command the support of my colleagues on essentially a unanimous basis.”