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Posted on 09/23/2008 7:10:27 PM PDT by NCDragon
WASHINGTON — Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.
Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.
"If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices," said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
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Wait until after the election.
Wooohoooooooo! El Pueblo, unito...
Anybody who thinks the RATS have conceded on this doesn’t understand how the RATS operate.
Yes the ban will expire. And all the enviroterrorists will come crawling out of the wood work and file a blizzard of lawsuits that will tie this up for years.
We need an energy policy that, politely, tells the enviros to sit down and STFU.
If true, this is great!
Now we just have to win the election so our President can veto any new effort to re-establish this offshore drilling ban.
The Democrats will push to enact a new drilling ban after the election. If Obama is President, he will sign it.
Nope. See the post before yours. Upchuck nailed it - “a blizzard of lawsuits”.
Then, hopefully the Republicans will act like Republicans instead of mind numbed robots that will kiss the rump of Democrats because they want the MSM and DC party givers to love them.
I hope McCain has the sense to nail those #$%@’s with RICO prosecution if they are coordinating a shut down of legal activities via lawsuits.
Maybe that gang of 14 will help us out here. We must give President McCain and VP Palin something to work with. We need to stop the obstruction of this Democrat controlled congress.
Not necessarily conceding defeat.
Now they can say they allowed drilling to resume.
I’d like to think that was true. But with McCain all experience has said he will be nice about it and let them do it.
What choice did they have? If we’d promise to elect Obama to office they’d burn Susan Sarandon at the stake on NBC if the nation asked. Talk about whores.
Is this correct?? Like the Power Line guys, I certainly had not known that the ban included oil shale, which is totally ludicrous. At least the offshore ban had some "slight" rationale---banning the exploitation of oil shale has none (except in the fever-swamp imaginations of the eco-idiots, wherein ANY use of natural resources is BAD).
Yeah, the election is coming up and for all they’re usually out of touch with mainstream America, this time they know what the people want.
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