“More grease in it than a NASCAR race pit.” - The Wall Street Journal
"One of the new tenants in this Louisiana riverwalk is a Hooters restaurant. Yes, my friends, an Energy bill subsidizing Hooters and polluters, probably giving new meaning to the phrase “budget busters.’’ Although I am sure there is a great deal of energy expended at Hooters, I have never been present. Perhaps something has been missing in my life.” = John McCain, R-Az
Political minded U.S. dopers - is this bill really this bad? I read in the Times that the size of the breaks startled the alleged experts:
A horrible, horrible bill. A perfect example of everything that’s wrong with government.
Every time there’s a very important bill, it gets loaded with pork because politicians know they can get away with more crap when the political stakes are too high for the bill itself to be vetoed or killed in committee.
And even though drilling in Alaska’s ANWR has been stopped (for now), “the Bush administration intends to open 8.8 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope to development of oil and gas, including areas considered environmentally sensitive.”
This Administration is giving away the bank, the building and the ground it sits on, to big business. Little to no talk about real energy conservation.
“Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said Wednesday he was ready to support the broad energy legislation and will oppose attempts block it over the issue of MTBE, a gasoline additive found to contaminate drinking water supplies. The bill would double ethanol use, an important issue in Daschle’s state where he faces re-election next year.” (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/20/energy.bill.ap/index.html )
NBC News reported tonight (no cite) the MTBE issue involves the government preventing citizens from suing energy companies over MTBE contamination of drinking water in more than half the country (28 states).
Drinking water!!! The Bush Administration is more concerned about protecting energy companies, their profits and owners, than the health of the American People in something so basic as drinking water!!
Well, if a bill can unite Environmental Defense and the WSJ editorial page in opposition to it (or, for that matter, jshore and Sam Stone), you know it’s gotta smell to high heaven!
I do think this attitude is too fatalistic though. Sure, there is a bipartisan tendency to add pork. But, the sad fact is that this bill probably says more about the particular people in power and their approach to government than it says about government in general. No good can come out of a bill when its first draft from the executive branch was crafted in secret by basically asking the lobbyists for the big entrenched energy industries what they wanted from it. And, the subsequent behind-closed-doors only-one-party-allowed conference committee didn’t help either.
This is what you get when you have a government which is captive to the special monied interests. Unfortunately, in the absence of the government, you’d still have the monied interests. The purpose of government is supposed to be to provide some counterbalance to these interests, by putting the interests of the people at large first, not to just aid and abet the monied interests. Of course, when everything is done in secret and with payoffs to campaign donors, it is inevitable that things will turn out this way.
It gives new demonstration to P.J. O’Rourke’s joke that “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” [He must have stolen that line from Al Frenken ]
But it’s not just ‘monied interests’. For example, Daschle is supporting the bill because it gets him big votes from the ethanol lobby in his state. And while Archer Daniels Midland is no doubt a big part of it, the fact is that the people of his state support this. Ethanol subsidies mean more money for farmers, more jobs for residents, more tax revenue.
This is also why politicians are doing flips and twists to come up with a very expensive prescription drug benefit for seniors. It doesn’t matter if such a program would wreck the budget, or if it would punish poor working families to benefit rich old people. What matters is that the AARP is a very powerful lobby and can make or break a politician. And the baby boom is nearing retirement, and this benefit goes straight into their pockets. And they make up the largest voter demographic. It’s the tyranny of the majority, this time across generational lands.
So politicians must support the desires of their constituents. And they represent the government, which has a monopoly on physical force and taxation. The end result is that spending goes up, and taxes go down. For an Iowan support ethanol subsidies is a no-brainer - all the other states get taxed a little, and his state gets all the benefit. As other states jockey for their own pet programs, you wind up with a giant shell game in which everyone gets their pork, and the costs get shuffled from state to state and eventually into debt.
I do believe this is the fundamental nature of representative democracy. This is why I am so skeptical of ‘reform’ movements - eventually, the citizenry just reorganizes its relationship with the government to get what it wants anyway. New organizations, new ways of supporting candidates through 3rd party advertising, and other methods get around campaign finance laws. When a ‘reform’ initiative targets an industry for cleaning up of corruption, another takes its place.
We’ve got a Republican President, leading a Republican-controlled Congress, with a Republican-dominated Supreme court, and you’re placing the blame on a non-partisan non-committal “government”?
Did you forget one of the strongest supporters of the bill, Tom Daschle? Or the fact that it got wide bipartisan support?
Come on, this isn’t just about Republicans. Granted, the Republicans could stop this bill from going anywhere, and the President could veto it. That they won’t is to their discredit.
But the Democrats could also stop it if they wanted. They could filibuster, and they could damned well not vote for it if it’s so bad. But again, support for this thing is fully bipartisan, therefore a pox on both their houses.
We’ll see how the vote comes out but I think the support here is far from “bipartisan” unless by bipartisan you mean buying off just enough Dems like Daschle to prevent a filibuster (and even that’s not clearly going to happen).
However, what pisses me off about some people’s opposition to this bill is how they decide how much it will cost. Many of the energy tax provisions (the only provisions I really know anything about) are designed (and predicted) to spur business growth, which leads to more income for energy businesses, which leads to more jobs and more taxes paid by the business and its employees. It’s ridiculous to just look at the lost revenue in the year the bill is enacted and say that’s the “cost” of the bill.
Given that the bill was crafted behind closed doors in secret by the GOP, I think that we know who to blame for the pork. Granted, the Democrats could be showing a lot more spine then they are, but there you have it.
It wasn’t just Daschle. It was virtually the entire delegations of ND, SD, IA who voted in favor of invoking cloture on the bill. Very non-partisan, unless described along the lines of pro-ethanol states against anti-MTBE states.
In all 13 Democrats voted in favor of cloture (if you consider Zell Miller a Democrat), but six Republicans voted against it (if you consider Olympia Snowe and Lincoln Chafee Republicans), plus Jeffords.
Aside from John McCain, the Republican splitters were all from New England, which stands to get screwed the worst if the liability waiver for MTBE companies stays in the bill (a waiver created, by the way, by House Sociopath-in-Chief Tom Delay).
The ethanol carrot was inserted specifically to draw away Senate Democrats from the midwest from opposing the MTBE waiver, and it worked, but not well enough. That MTBE waiver has the potential to be more expensive than all the rest of the bacon in the bill in one way, because it would transfer the cost and responsibility of cleaning up all that MTBE-polluted groundwater to you, the residents of the East Coast.
Frankly, I have no opinion on that issue, since the damned federal government was the body which sanctioned MTBE’s use to begin with and I think it’s going to be difficult to show that MTBE producers are liable, anyway. What I don’t like is the Republican Party’s propensity to insert itself in the middle of yet-to-be-decided court cases in order to protect their own interests. What are they trying to cover up, the fact that the oil companies unduly influenced Billy Tauzin and Tom Delay while concealing evidence that MTBE is nasty shit? They’re trying to ensure that you never know.
(It should be noted that Majority Leader Bill Frist also switched his vote to the “no” side, but only in order to be able to move to reconsider the vote at a later time.)
Oops, I’m sorry. I should add that the above was culled largely from my monitoring of Congressional Quarterly, which is proprietary and cannot be reproduced here.
Just to give a summary of the numbers where we count a vote for cloture as a YES on the energy bill and a NO on cloture as a NO on the bill [since it is a forgone conclusion it will pass if they can get cloture]:
YES: 58 votes (45 Reps and 13 Dems)
NO: 39 votes ( 6 Reps and 33 Dems)
NOT VOTING: 3 (all Dems)
Here is the NY Times article on the vote. I have moved Frist from NO to YES since his NO was done for purely technical reasons as Sofa King and the NY Times article both explain.
While this was not a party-line vote, I think it is an abuse of terminology to call it “bipartisan” when the Dems voted more than 2-to-1 against it (even if you count not-voting as NO) while the Republicans voted more than 7-to-1 in favor of it. Clearly, the Republican bribery strategy, with the ethanol and such, almost worked…and may yet still work. We shall see.
I am proud to see that one of my senators, Chuck Schumer was co-leading the fight against it.
Of course, that ought to read “(even if you count not-voting as YES)”.
By the way, Sam, I think it is quite a bit of understatement to say the Republicans could stop the bill if they wanted to and that the President could veto it and so forth. First, before they even do that, they could stop twisting arms and granting favors to try to get senators to support it! Your statement is sort of like saying that Bush could have stopped the U.S. armed forces from going to war in Iraq if he wanted to. It is technically true, I suppose, but a rather perverse way to phrase it.
Urgh…errors, double posts…I don’t seem to be doing very well here! I just re-read Sofa King’s post and realized I forgot about Jeffords in my count. I think the correct count is:
YES: 58 votes (45 Reps and 13 Dems)
NO: 39 votes ( 6 Reps and 32 Dems and 1 Indep)
NOT VOTING: 3 (all Dems)
Oh, yeah, it’s still fairly partisan, but the operative votes which temporarily put the bill on ice were reversed from normal partisan lines.
Cloture is an interesting vote in the Senate these days because it requires truly bipartisan support. That’s why you see Senate Democrats relying so heavily on filibusters this year–it is, quite literally, the only process they have left with which to participate in our modern one-party system. (It’s also why you see the Republicans saying they want to reduce the cloture vote to a simple majority.)
However, this bill shows that politics is always politics and the party still takes second place to constituent interest.
Another example of ideological conflict within the Republican party is probably the Alaska drilling bullshit, some of which bled into this bill. The neocons probably realize better than most that the real way to ensure strategic energy self-sufficiency is to burn off your enemy’s fuel while you keep your own safely tucked away, unmolested and underground, for the rainy day when you need it. Corporate Republicans see it as a necessary and relatively innocuous way of paying off their benefactors while utterly bullshitting themselves and the public about “energy self-sufficiency,” which exploiting our remaining reserves won’t provide. Alaskans need the work.
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