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Republicans have strengthened their control of Congress, but that won't necessarily mean smooth sailing for the agenda of Bush and the GOP.

The Senate - described by House Republicans as the place where good bills go to die - will now be more open to passing long-stalled bills on energy and highways. New tax cuts look more likely. Republicans will feel emboldened on everything from cutting regulation to stepping up the war on terror.

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The new GOP freshman class in the Senate also includes conservatives with strong ideological credentials, such as Reps. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and David Vitter of Louisiana, and, especially, former Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

As an outspoken, self-term-limited member of the insurgent House "Class of '94," Dr. Coburn has already proved he can be as formidable an opponent to the GOP leadership as the Democrats when he believes conservative principles are at stake. When GOP leaders abandoned term limits or perpetuated pork-barrel spending, he called them hypocrites. "By the end of my time in Congress, careerism had trumped fiscal conservatism," he writes in his 2003 book, "Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders."

No surprise, then, that the White House did not initially back his candidacy. But conservative groups did and bankrolled his run.

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Any move to push a hard-right agenda in the Senate - on issues from the judiciary to budgets - could prompt resistance from within the Republican caucus, as well as from the Democrats.

"The moderate wing of the Republican party may be increasingly uncomfortable with the issues that these new, very conservative senators will be raising. It could even drive a couple of them out of the party," says Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University.

But the Energy policy is much much more than just drilling in Alaska. Hell if they were smart, they would be drilling off Florida and California and investing more in the drilling off Newfoundland in Canada.

Bush's policy has a lot of conservation techniques in it as well as going for investments in alternative fuel sources and investing/partnering in Canada's resources (an non OPEC country) and Mexico .

Of course all we hear from the whining MSM is the friggin death to the Caribou etc. if the drill in Alaska.