Congress has a history, and history shapes context. One factor underlying the Barton-Boehlert spat is no doubt the fact that in the early 1990s Mr. Boehlert was staunchly against the Super-Conducting Supercollider (SSC), a project that he helped to terminate which would have been built in the district of Rep. Joe Barton.

Here is what Mr. Boelhert said about the project in 1991:

“Whose priority is the SSC, anyway? Not the nation’s struggling young scientists, who are starving for individual-investigator grants across a wide variety of fields. Not the nation’s scientific societies, who support the SSC only to the extent that other needs are met first. Not the nation’s leading corporations, who see the SSC as having fewer industrial spinoffs than any other big-science project. Not the House of Representatives, which voted last year to discontinue the project if it was going to cost the federal government more than $5 billion. The SSC is a priority for only three groups: for Texas officials–and we can all understand that–who obtained a giant public works project for their state; for DOE officials, who would rather continually break promises made to Congress than cancel the project; and for a relatively small group of researchers in an esoteric field, who, understandably, think their research is more important than anyone’s.”

For his part, Mr. Barton took the loss of the SSC hard, as suggested by this news article in Science:

“Memories of the failed Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) die hard, particularly in Texas. Representative Joe Barton (R), who represents the area that was to be the SSC’s home, vowed last week to oppose the $450 million contribution that the Department of Energy (DOE) wants to make to another high-energy physics research project, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. Barton, a member of the House Science Committee but not its energy subcommittee, may not have much control over DOE funding. But his statement will play well with constituents, and it concerns DOE officials. The Europeans “didn’t help us, and they went out of their way to stop the SSC,” Barton complained in a 6 March hearing of the subcommittee. “I’ll be beep-beep-beeped if we’ll send a dollar to Europe.” Barton said that while he does not oppose U.S. scientists working at CERN, he does take issue with the DOE-CERN agreement, which requires the United States to help build portions of the acceler! ator and its detectors through 2004. (The National Science Foundation would chip in about $80 million.) Barton wants the United States to have more administrative oversight at CERN, and he wants the Europeans to promise to assist in building future U.S. facilities. “One congressman can raise a lot of sand,” he warned DOE energy research chief Martha Krebs, who was testifying before the panel. “I know where the bodies are buried, and I intend to dig them up,” said Barton, who left immediately after making his statement.”