Comprehensive Energy Reform Bill Runs Out of Gas

Comprehensive Energy Reform Bill Runs Out of Gas

Mar 09 - Albuquerque Journal

President Bush will have some legislative victories to brag about in his re-election campaign, but energy policy reform is not likely to be one of them.

Despite three years of intense effort by lawmakers -- and occasional cajoling by the Bush administration -- efforts to pass a national energy bill are once again running out of gas.

The problem isn't so much between Republicans and Democrats as between the two chambers of Congress. And in an election year, neither is willing to budge.

The Republican-controlled House wants one type of bill, and the narrowly divided Senate wants something much different. The result is likely to be no bill at all -- at a time when fuel prices are rising, the Middle East is erupting and the electricity grid is no more reliable than it was last summer, when the lights went out from Michigan to New York.

A senior Republican Senate aide who is close to the House-Senate negotiations told me late last week that the chances of an energy bill passing this year are slim to none.

"The odds of getting an energy bill along the lines of what we have proposed is maybe 25 percent," the aide said.

Rep. Joe Barton, the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the House, which passed its version of an energy bill last year, is done. The Senate can take the House bill or leave it, according to the Texas Republican.

"I don't see any need to make any changes," Barton said.

Rep. Ralph Hall, another Texan Republican who sits on the House energy panel, said energy and elections don't mix.

"This is a hard year to be trying to put the energy bill through," he told reporters at a news conference last week.

Sen. Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is also at the middle of the conflict.

Domenici suffered a gut-wrenching political defeat late last year when he fell just two votes shy of passing an energy bill and sending it to the president's desk.

He lost because senators from both parties said the bill was larded up with so much pork (almost $30 billion in subsidies for energy industries) that they couldn't move it off the Senate floor. Even the White House wouldn't get behind the bill because it feared political fallout from a ballooning federal deficit.

After the holiday break, Domenici came back to Washington, dusted off his bill and promptly trimmed it in half -- eliminating subsidies for off-shore gas drilling, his beloved nuclear power and other sources of energy. He also scrapped a controversial provision that would have shielded the manufacturers of a fuel additive called MTBE from liability lawsuits.

Barton and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay responded, essentially saying, "No MTBE liability protections, no bill."

But the Senate won't be bullied on MTBE.

"It won't be in there," the senior GOP aide told me.

Bush made energy reform a cornerstone of his 2000 campaign, saying domestic production was essential to America's economic and national security. But he never gave the issue much more than lip- service once he moved into the White House.

Sure, he dispatched Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Vice President Dick Cheney to Capitol Hill a few times to twist arms, but Senate Republicans have grumbled that the president himself never really got involved.

Of course, Sept. 11 changed the president's focus. And in late 2001, Democrats briefly took over the Senate and put Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico in charge of the Senate energy committee. Bingaman actually managed to get the Senate to approve a bill, but it did not provide for Bush's pet project -- drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

That dampened the enthusiasm of House Republicans. Domenici wisely decided not to include the ANWR provision in his bill because it was a proven deal-killer for Senate Democrats, who would and could filibuster to kill any bill that contained it.

Bingaman has long suggested the massive energy bill, which deals with issues ranging from nuclear power to wind energy to domestic oil drilling, should be broken into smaller pieces.

Domenici and Senate Republicans started to move that direction late last week, tacking some tax credit extensions for energy production -- including the production of wind energy -- onto other bills late Thursday night.

In the absence of a major, comprehensive bill, it will be interesting to see which pieces of energy legislation Congress moves before the election. It will say a lot about which energy issues really matter to lawmakers -- and which of these industries have the most clout in Congress.