Today in Washington D. C. - May 8, 2008

On The Floor: The Senate will resume consideration of the flood insurance bill (S. 2284). Yesterday, the Senate defeated an amendment to add wind coverage to flood insurance and also voted down three other amendments to the bill. The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to hold a markup on the Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental appropriations bill today.

It’s just another week of Democrat mismanagement on both sides of the Capitol:
In the Senate: Senate Democrats unvails new energy policy - kill the industry - create even higher gas prices and fuel shortages in the future! The AP reports, “Senate Democrats on Wednesday called for a temporary windfall profits tax on oil companies and a rollback of $17 billion in oil industry tax breaks as part of an energy package. The proposal also would impose federal penalties on energy price gouging and calls for stopping oil deliveries into the government's emergency reserve.” Included is a provision aimed at cracking down on speculation in the oil futures market to prevent traders of U.S. crude oil futures from routing transactions to offshore markets in order to increase transparency and accountability of the trades and would increase the margin requirement for oil futures trades”

Clearly, these ideas will do anything to increase oil supplies. Several of the Democrats’ proposals are actively harmful to energy markets and suppliers. The chief executive of the New York Mercantile Exchange told The Wall Street Journal that the regulatory plan on futures markets would “potentially cripple the U.S. exchanges and move that flow of trading away from the U.S.-regulated markets to non-U.S.-regulated markets.”

Even the Democrats’ Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), told The Albuquerque Journal that he opposes the windfall profits tax: “Specifically, Bingaman said the windfall profits tax is bad policy because it creates ‘inconsistencies’ in the commodities markets. ‘It's very difficult to determine what's a windfall profit and what's not,’ Bingaman said. ‘It's very arbitrary.’” Arbitrarily punishing oil companies for making money isn’t the only problem with the windfall profits tax, of course. When it was last tried in 1980, the Congressional Research Service reported that “the entire effect of the tax [was] to reduce domestic production and supply” and “made the United States more dependent upon foreign oil.” Other Democrat senators voiced to voice doubts over the Democrats’ energy plan. Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) were critical of regulating futures markets and hiking taxes on oil companies, respectively.

In the House, Democrats are in disarray on the supplemental war funding bill. Though leaders had planned to vote on the bill today, objections from Blue Dogs over offsets to tacked-on spending forced Democrats to postpone a vote. A series of news stories this week has chronicled the unhappiness of Democrats with various provisions of the bill. CQ Today summarizes, “the leadership’s strategy for the spending . . . is defensive in nature and designed to frustrate the desires of most Democrats” but at the same time allow them to vote for things they like and against things they dislike.

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