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917 



the future of electric cars. The report was negative on the technological 

 advances possible in batteries, and concluded that the effect on petro- 

 leum consumption would be minimal. Wydler concluded: 



Nobody knows if these vehicles are going to work, nobody knows how well 

 they are going to work, and nobody knows what we are going to do with them if 

 they do not work. 



He advised that the budgetary situation was in such bad shape that 

 he felt obliged to vote to sustain the veto. 



Ottinger refuted Wydler 's statement that the electric cars didn't 

 work, pointing to his own experience and that of Representative 

 Charles Rose (Democrat of North Carolina), who drove to and from 

 the Capitol every day in their electric cars. Brown suggested that the 

 President's veto might stem from Congress initiating the bill rather 

 than the White House. He also talked about the problem of "tech- 

 nological inertia" which seemed to grip those administering many 

 programs: 



In some areas we have so specialized and institutionalized our technology that 

 we have established overwhelming barriers to change. Long after the conditions 

 which spawned the technology have passed away, we are often still locked into an 

 out-moded pattern — technologically inflexible dinosaurs facing extinction in a 

 changing world. 



VICTORY FOR THE COMMITTEE 



There were a few more speeches, but Members had already made 

 up their minds. When the roll was called, the supporters of the bill 

 succeeded in overriding the veto on September 16, 1976 by 307 to 101, 

 comfortably above the necessary two-thirds. Wydler and Jarman were 

 the only committee members to vote to sustain the President's veto, 

 which was also overridden in the Senate by 53-20 on September 17. 

 It was a significant victory for the committee and especially for Mc- 

 Cormack who had led the fight. McCormack took particular pride in 

 the fact it was only the 89th occasion in American history that a 

 President's veto had been overridden. 



On July 12, 1977, the McCormack subcommittee held a one-day 

 hearing on the program objective and schedule for the "Electric and 

 Hybrid Vehicle Act," passed over the President's veto in 1976. McCor- 

 mack related to the subcommittee that there had been a 9-month 

 delay in action to appropriate money to implement the act, after which 

 the House Appropriations Committee had severely underfunded that 

 program in 1977. An effort by committee members to overturn the 

 Appropriations Committee action and increase the funding was de- 

 feated on the House floor in 1977. Thus, the "technological inertia" 

 described by Brown was matched in 1977 by "appropriations inertia." 

 McCormack still felt that "we will have small electric vehicles that 



