Congressional Republicans have put aside their differences and finally agreed to a budget deal — which makes it likely that there will be oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The AP gives these details on the tentative deal:
House and Senate Republican leaders have reached tentative agreement on a budget that envisions $10 billion in Medicaid savings over the next five years and at least $70 billion in tax cuts, congressional officials said Thursday.
It could also open the way to oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
These officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the tentative agreement envisions spending of about $2.6 trillion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Over five years, it relies on savings from farm, student loan and pension programs to achieve President Bush’s goal of cutting deficits in half over the next five years.
Even before Republican leaders formally unveiled the emerging agreement, Democrats hastened to attack it.
“It will add to the deficit, it won’t diminish the deficit,” said Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
The budget blueprint itself is nonbinding and does not require Bush’s signature. At the same time, it anticipates that Congress will enact follow-up legislation to implement its goals.
Several papers have blasted the budget blueprint, criticizing its priorities. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has especially harsh words for the way the it green lights ANWR drilling:
One other feature of this appalling process is worth special mention — using the budget-making machinery to quietly authorize oil wells in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In poll after poll, majorities of Americans have opposed drilling in this pristine wilderness. Until this year, so did a majority of senators. While the last election appears to have provided a bare minimum of 51 votes for drilling, the Republicans still lack the 60 needed to block an inevitable filibuster.
So the budget resolution, which is filibuster-proof under Senate rules, was fitted with language assuming new revenue from oil-lease sales on refuge lands. Apparently that move wasn’t sneaky enough — this week, the Republican leaders were said to have deleted specific mention of the refuge and instead instructed the prodrilling House and Senate resource committees to do the dirty work during the even more obscure “reconcilation” phase of budgeting.
The secondary purpose of such subterfuge, of course, is to confer deniability — enabling senators to tell their wilderness-minded constituents they were simply voting for a must-have federal budget, of which that Arctic business was but one small and regrettable part.
The real message of this maneuver is that the Republicans, despite their firm control of both Congress and the White House, are pushing an agenda so unpopular that they feel compelled to mask its most outrageous elements with budgetary murk.
The debate over ANWAR is not a one sided one, however. Those who want it offer a list of reasons. Click here to read 10 reason why anwr.org feels development in the region should be supported.
Even so, Republicans have not always been synonomous with developing lands that many sought to keep protected. Some Republicans protected fiercly protected the environment — and their legacy lives on.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.