The environmental lobby:
Like rooters at a championship game, a group of two dozen environmental lobbyists whooped and exchanged high-fives in the Senate antechamber as one red-state Democrat after another fell into their column.
It was inching toward 1 o'clock in the afternoon Wednesday when the gavel finally fell on a vote that apparently killed this year's effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. But as early as 12:25, Brian Moore, the legislative director of the Alaska Wilderness League, was on a cellphone in the corner telling his scattered troops: "You guys rock. We won. Nice work."
It's too bad Senator Johnson has chosen to side with the environmentalists instead of supporting ANWR and thus cutting gas prices.
The issue here isn't that ANWR will deliver immediate energy relief. ANWR drilling is a long-term solution to U.S. energy problems. With rising demand for oil by India and China, the oil supply will increasingly decrease for the rest of the world. Plus, as USA Today pointed out, the hurricanes from this summer proved how domestic oil production is overly concentrated in the Gulf of Mexico. What is the Democratic solution? To lament high gas prices and lecture us on the importance of cutting our dependence on foreign oil, only to vote against increasing our domestic oil production?
I don't expect ANWR to be the solve-all solution to energy problems. But it does offer a long-term augmentation of supply that offers us sovereignty from foreign oil.
Along with ANWR, Senator Johnson also voted against LIHEAP, which would have provided assistance to poor and low-income citizens--he supported it before he voted against it. The ANWR provision would have funded LIHEAP, which Johnson has been complaining about. But since he sided with the environmentalists, there's no ANWR and no LIHEAP money. Instead of caving to the environmental lobby, Johnson should have stood up for South Dakota. Will anybody in the South Dakota media take him to task for this? By the way, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which gave Johnson a huge vote in 2002, is having an especially difficult time with LIHEAP funding this winter. Johnson had implored the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to release a portion of LIHEAP funds to help out with winter heating costs for the residents of the reservation. Now he's voted against it. I wonder what they're thinking now.
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