Posted on 12/21/2005 9:41:42 AM PST by Graybeard58
WASHINGTON -- The Incredible Hulk appeared Tuesday on the Senate floor, adorning the necktie of Sen. Ted Stevens -- a familiar sign that the veteran from Alaska is pumped for the fight to open part of an arctic wildlife refuge to oil drilling.
But to hear his colleagues tell it, Stevens is more like the Grinch who would steal Christmas -- and New Year's, if need be -- to collect on his end of a vote-swapping deal he struck with two Democrats 25 years ago.
"A promise made is a debt unpaid," Stevens, 82, is fond of repeating. "This is a debt unpaid to this Senate, to the country, to Alaska."
Back in 1980, the deal went like this: Vote yes on setting aside 19 million acres of wilderness, said Sens. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Congress will support permission to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Stevens agreed. Tsongas and Jackson, meanwhile, died before Congress could grant permission to drill.
Their debt survives, Stevens insists. And he's playing procedural hardball to make the Senate pay up.
"We're going to have to face up to ANWR either now or Christmas Day or New Year's Eve or sometime," Stevens thundered from the Senate floor Tuesday, bucking criticism from drilling opponents furious that he succeeded in attaching the drilling permission to a must-pass bill to fund the military.
Off the floor, Stevens acknowledged he has little to lose by muscling opponents into this uncomfortable choice: Vote for a bill that allows arctic drilling or be seen as blocking money for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, new aid for hurricane victims and subsidies to help the poor meet what are expected to be record winter heating bills.
"This is the toughest battle I've ever had," Stevens said Tuesday.
The big green guy on the necktie is famous in the Senate for injecting a bit of playfulness into spending fights during Stevens' years chairing the Senate Appropriations Committee. "I've won every other battle with it on, so I'm wearing it for this one," Stevens said.
All-night sessions and a list of stalled bills have left little humor on Capitol Hill as the clock ticks toward the end of the year.
"This is, after all, Christmas!" Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., complained on the Senate floor.
The showdown vote could come as early as today.
The 1980 law doubled to 19 million acres the size of the Alaska wildlife refuge. Stevens said he supported that law only after Jackson and Tsongas promised him that Congress would later consider allowing drilling on a 1.5 million-acre tract bordering the Beaufort Sea.
Democrats disagreed on whether current senators are obligated to pay what Stevens calls a "debt" owed him by Jackson and Tsongas.
"The Grinch Who Stole the Defense Bill," they called Stevens in a news release put out Tuesday by the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee and Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
"Every Senator in Washington liked the defense bill a lot," they added, channeling Dr. Seuss. "But Stevens, who lives north, in Alaska, did NOT."
This is about right, DIMS complaining about Christmas...
Drilling seems perfectly compatible with that provision. Two aspects of the same problem.
Hey DIMS! It's equivalent to the "death tax" you push on the surfs everyday...get used to it!
Wait a minute, we only talking about 1.5 million of the 19 million acres is for drilling?
Cloture failed. There were 55 or 56 votes for cloture, short of the 60 needed.
Wrong, Baucus...it's the 'holiday season'. You and your other communist sympathizers in the Antiamerican Criminal Liberties Union have said so.
And Senator Stevens is SHOCKED, SHOCKED, that the 'rats would go back on their word.
Well Frist just ended his chance at the nomation,he voting with the dems.
Frist made a procedural vote. In order to bring the bill back up for consideration he had to vote against it. Check your Roberts Rules of Order.
Oh ok, stupide senate rules. No wonder they never get elected president.
Actually, the bill survives a failed cloture motion, and debate continues. Frist's motion to reconsider (the cloture vote) doesn't have much of a substantive point.
Oh, it's "Christmas" now, is it?
Is Steven's willing to filibuster now that he has lost? Anyone know?
2000 acres for drilling
Right
The biggest problem I can see is that all the players have been in Congress TOO DAMNED LONG.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121401933.html
Our Fake Drilling Debate-- 12/15/05 --George Will
(Snip)
Opponents worry that the caribou will be disconsolate about, and their reproduction disrupted by, this intrusion by man. The same was said 30 years ago by opponents of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which brings heated oil south from Prudhoe Bay. Since the oil began flowing, the caribou have increased from 5,000 to 31,000. Perhaps the pipeline's heat makes them amorous.
Ice roads and helicopter pads, which will melt each spring, will minimize man's footprint, which will be on a 2,000-acre plot about one-fifth the size of Dulles Airport. Nevertheless, opponents say the environmental cost is too high for what the ineffable John Kerry calls "a few drops of oil." Some drops. The estimated 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil -- such estimates frequently underestimate actual yields -- could supply all the oil needs of Kerry's Massachusetts for 75 years.
Flowing at 1 million barrels a day -- equal to 20 percent of today's domestic oil production -- ANWR oil would almost equal America's daily imports from Saudi Arabia.
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg072001.shtml
Big Oil, Caribou, and Greed --- Jonah Goldberg
(snip) --- I recently went to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I hung out with folks who know how to fix their own cars and have totally legitimate reasons to carry knives on their belts. I also got to see what Joe Lieberman called "one of the most beautiful, pristine places that the good Lord has created on Earth" and "one of God's most awesome creations."
This is a form of divine slander, like saying Ghostbusters II was some of Bill Murray's best work; it's unfair both to God and to the cooler stuff in the Almighty's oeuvre. But such declarations are also a con. When you watch the evening-news programs on ANWR, most of the time you see mountains and beautiful rivers and lakes and all that. But that's not where they want to drill for oil. In fact, they can't drill for oil in those places for two very straightforward reasons. First, there's no oil there. Second, it's against the law.
In fact, the only spot where it's legal to drill for oil is on what's called the coastal plain of ANWR, the snippet on the northern coast of the Refuge. You rarely see pictures of the coastal plain, because it's not what TV producers call a "beauty shot" (I know this hyper-technical TV lingo from my years as a producer). So, they show mountains and Disney animals and crystal-clear running water and say, "This is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the evil greasy snout-nosed Republicans want to gouge the planet for a thimbleful of oil."
But that's only true in the sense it's not an outright lie. Yes, the drilling would be in ANWR, but it wouldn't be where the beauty shots are. It's like doing an on-location report on New York City's urban blight and crime, but broadcasting from a café in Rockefeller Center. The coastal plain is, in fact, a vast tract of peat bog and mud puddles (sounds like a crime fighting duo: "Tune in this fall to see Pete Bog and his fast-talking streetwise sidekick Mudd Puddles, tackle evildoers. Tuesdays at 9.").
The coastal plain is a breeding ground for all sorts of awful flying critters. There are trillions of mosquitoes. There are these creatures called warble flies and nosebots, two bumblebee-like flies that cause the caribou unrelenting grief. I could swear I even saw Alan Dershowitz whiz past my ear.
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