It has taken months and gas rising to over $5 a gallon in some areas, but we now have a partial victory.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.What this means is that the Democrats are running scared. They see that the nation is hurting, that their polls are hurting and this issue is hurting Barack Hussein Obama's chances in November.
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.
Democrats had clung to the hope of only a partial repeal of the drilling moratorium, but the White House had promised a veto, Obey said.
The House is expected to act on the spending bill Wednesday. The Senate is likely to go along with the House.
While the House would lift the long-standing drilling moratoriums for both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a drilling ban in waters within 125 miles of Florida's western coast would remain in force under a law passed by Congress in 2006 that opened some new areas of the east-central Gulf to drilling.Just last week, the House passed legislation to open waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil and gas drilling but only 50 or more miles out to sea and only if a state agrees to energy development off its shore. It quickly became clear that measure would not get the 60 votes needed in the Senate.
Republicans called that effort a sham that would have left almost 90 percent of offshore reserves effectively off-limits.
The Interior Department estimates there are 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil beneath the Outer Continental Shelf, about half of it off California.
The congressional battle over offshore drilling is far from over. Democrats are expected to press for broader energy legislation, probably next year, that would put limits on any drilling off most of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to fight any resumption of the drilling bans that have been in place since 1981.
John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has promised to make offshore oil drilling a priority if elected president. He has called for developing the oil and gas resources along all of Outer Continental Shelf and for the federal government to share royalties with states who go along with drilling.
Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama has said he would support limited drilling in certain areas -- possibly the South Atlantic region -- if it is part of a broader energy plan to shift the U.S. away from oil to alternative fuels and more energy efficiency.
The debate over offshore drilling is not expected to subside in the first months of the next presidency -- no matter who sits in the White House.
While this doesn't solve the problem in the foreseeable future, it is a start and we should see the effects of this some time next year. And we still have to get the Congress to open up ANWAR to oil exploration and development.
And if Congress hadn't left on their 5 week vacation and had addressed this problem, we would have been doing this sooner. And Americans would be feeling the effects of this sooner.
This is what happens when you have a Congressional Leadership that is more interested in playing politics than in what happens to the nation. This is why they must leave in November.
But still, it is a partial victory. So we can celebrate a bit.
