News
Email
Print
Congress' response to gas price is to sputter
Both parties jockeyed for political points
ADVERTISEMENT
RELATED INFORMATION
» Click here for a map of area gas prices and a special report on money-saving tips.
Published: August 1, 2008
WASHINGTON
In a summer of nationwide anguish over fuel costs, Congress' attack on high gasoline prices has been full of high-octane rhetoric and low-energy results.
Both parties instead have fought bitterly for weeks over who can make the best political points for the November elections, with Republicans pressing for more domestic oil drilling and Democrats railing about oil-company profits.
Despite hundreds of hours of debate on the House and Senate floors over the country's energy problems, legislators will leave Washington with an empty tank this week for their five-week summer break.
Congress' sole legislative response to people's anger over $4 gas and expectations of record heating costs this winter has been to stop a small amount of oil from being shipped into the government's emergency reserve. The shipments ended, but oil and gasoline prices continued to rise.
Through the year, proposals surfaced and then fell by the wayside under partisan assaults. Among them were bills to make energy-price gouging a federal crime, to curb oil-market speculation, to extend tax credits for wind and solar energy, to tax windfall profits of the largest oil companies, to subject the OPEC oil cartel to U.S. antitrust laws, to release oil from the government emergency stockpile and to encourage the development of nuclear energy and the use of coal as a motor fuel.
The proposals were offered by Democrats and Republicans. All have gone nowhere.
One energy issue has overshadowed the others: Congress has been in gridlock because of sharp disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over whether to open the coastal waters of the Atlantic and Pacific to oil and gas drilling.
For the third time in three days, President Bush called on legislators yesterday to lift bans on offshore drilling.
"If you want to take pressure off price, we ought to be sending a signal that the United States is going to find oil right here in our own hemisphere," he told a meeting of the West Virginia Coal Association.
On Capitol Hill, there seemed to be no interest in compromise.
Instead, Republicans saw the call for more domestic drilling as political gold. They are hoping to use it as a way to outflank Democrats in an election year when voters expect Washington to respond to high gasoline and other energy costs.
"They're like a dog with a bone, and they're not letting go," one Democrat said about the Republican push for offshore oil development.
Democrats know well that opinion polls show that the public overwhelmingly favors more domestic energy development. So they have countered with their own drilling message.
"Democrats are for drilling," the House majority leader, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said this week, repeating the assertion several times for emphasis. "We're not necessarily for drilling where they (Republicans) want to drill."
The Democrats say that oil companies already have 68 million acres of federal land and offshore waters available under government leases that they could pursue.
Congressional Democrats have repeatedly targeted oil companies' profits, hoping to take some of the attention away from the GOP assault over offshore drilling.
Exxon Mobil Corp. said yesterday that it earned $11.68 billion in the second quarter, the most by the U.S. corporation.
"The top five oil companies are now on track to hit $160 billion in profits for the year," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., releasing a report that showed that much of those profits are used to buy back stock and not spent on new production.
But Democratic proposals to tax windfall profits of the five largest oil companies and repeal some of their tax breaks have also gone nowhere, ending in more partisan fights, GOP filibusters and a promise of a presidential veto.
"My Republican colleagues are buying the line of Big Oil," the Senate majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said this week.
"Surely Americans are tired of Republicans delaying and rejecting every effort Democrats make to solve our nation's (energy) problems," Reid said as it became increasingly certain that Congress was punting on energy -- at least until fall.
The Senate minority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that energy is "the No. 1 issue" facing the country and that "the American people are clamoring for legislation that will bring down the price of gas."
It is an assertion Democrats would not challenge. But that does not mean the two parties were any closer to agreeing what to do about it.
"We need to come together in a bipartisan approach," Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said on the Senate floor. "It's time to act. It's time to stop playing politics."
As legislators pushed to leave town -- in many cases to face angry voters on the campaign trail -- there was little reason to think that will happen.
Email
Print
ADVERTISEMENT
N.C. Politics
Federal Politics
Advertisement
