The Senate is blowing town this week for the August recess once again leaving House Democrats high and dry and defending an unpopular bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) punted the Senate’s bogus oil spill “response” bill to September due to lack of support.
Moving into the realm of the bizarre, some Senate Democrats objected to the bill because they wanted higher “renewable energy standards” as if that somehow caused the failure of the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon well.
Go figure.
In an instance that was truly surprising, no Senate Republicans backed the bogus bill.
Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, predicted Reid would leave House rank-and-file Democrats again holding the bag of unpopular votes.
“It’s no surprise that Senate Democrats do not want to vote on an oil spill bill that will cost jobs in the Gulf Coast and increase energy prices when Americans can least afford it,” Hastings said. “Just like the overwhelmingly unpopular cap-and-trade national energy tax, Speaker Pelosi forced House Democrats to cast unabashed liberal votes based on the charade that the Senate would follow and provide political cover."
Last week, the House passed its version of a bogus response bill, the Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources (CLEAR) Act, which raises taxes by a whopping $22 billion dollars while failing to address the actual causes of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Democrats in both the House and Senate sought to push unrelated, tax-increasing, job-killer bills in the name of responding to the Gulf Coast tragedy, rather than truly working to achieve a bipartisan bill that will actually help Gulf Coast families, the environment and make offshore drilling safer,” Hastings said.
Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) points out that the CLEAR Act was introduced in the House two hundred twenty-six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig collapsed. But it was repackaged and passed by the House last week as a response to the BP oil spill.
"It all comes back to the fact that the petroleum engineers from the National Academy of Engineering that said the causes of the well failure were definite and could be addressed, but now we’re going to raise the liability caps because we’re going to stick it to big oil," Cassidy told HUMAN EVENTS of the CLEAR Act vote. “We’re not sticking it to big oil. What we’re doing is we’re sticking it to small and medium sized independent producers who control 90% of the leases, and, by the way, create 300,000 jobs.”
Never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, Democrats want to use the crisis to cripple the oil and natural gas industry setting unlimited liability on all offshore operators. Current law already states that in the case of gross negligence the $75 million cap does not apply.
The small, independent oil and gas producers operating in the Gulf of Mexico and on the Outer Continental Shelf - with sterling safety records - lack the wherewithal to self-insure against potential unlimited liability costs.
“There are only four or five companies that are big enough to handle the unlimited liability,” Cassidy said. “What you’re saying to the people who hold 90% of the leases is you can’t drill. That’s a heck of a lot of energy production and a heck of a lot of jobs.”
For a rundown on the battle of the CLEAR Act legislation that passed the House last Friday, the Louisiana delegation battle to lift the moratorium, Cassidy’s spirited floor speech and the Democrat amendment hi-jinks, the local Louisiana outlet The Hayride has the full story here.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), top Republican on Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, wasn’t surprised Reid punted the Senate version of the oil spill "response" bill to September.
“That Majority Leader Reid scrapped plans to consider oil spill legislation this week is not surprising; it merely exposes what we already knew: this was an empty political exercise from the beginning,” Inhofe said. “Meanwhile, as the Majority Leader dithers about how to exploit an environmental tragedy, thousands of workers in the Gulf are suffering because of President Obama's offshore energy moratorium. The Republican alternative, of course, would do away with this job-killing nightmare. Yet now, everyone from fishermen to manufacturers to waiters to rig workers is left wondering whether they'll get their jobs back. The message those folks got today from Sen. Reid? Keep wondering.”
