Baker had not taken a position before. Howard Baker was a leading sponsor of an amendment to the Endangered Species Act that was passed into law in November 1978. The idea was to create a mechanism whereby a specific project could be excluded from the Endangered Species Act. If a controversy arose, the amendment called for the creation of a special committee consisting of various Cabinet level members and at least one member from the affected state where the project in question was located. It came to be known as the "God Committee" because if they exercised their power to exempt a project from the act, they were in effect acting like God and allowing destruction of an entire species. There was a fear by project supporters in Congress that many projects in the country would be affected by litigation as biologists might set out to discover obscure species, including insects or even micro-biotic life forms. The proponents of the "God Committee" amendment believed it could be a means to protect the Endangered Species Act. According to the Burger opinion, U.S. endangered species laws at that time "represented the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species ever enacted by any nation". But, instead of granting Tellico an exemption from the Endangered Species Act, the committee voted unanimously in favor of the snail darter, largely finding that the dam project had poor economic issues. On January 23, 1979, the Committee unanimously denied an exemption for Tellico, specifically on economic grounds, rather than ecological grounds. "I hate to see the snail darter get the credit for stopping a project that was ill-conceived and uneconomic in the first place," said Chairman Andrus. The reservoir project deserved to be killed on its own merits. As Charles Schultze, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and a member of the Committee, said, "Here is a project that is 95% complete, and if one takes the cost of finishing it against the total project benefits, and does it properly, it doesn't pay, which says something about the original design." The opposition made much of the problematic benefit-cost issue throughout the 1970s. Despite his credentials as one of the nation's top economists, however, Schultze was no more prepared to accurately predict future benefits than anyone else at the time. Wheeler and McDonald state the problem was TVA's general unfamiliarity with the econometric models used to