Today in Washington, D.C. - June 15, 2010 - Americans Want The Leak Plugged, Not Excuses For Cap-And-Tax Plans

The Senate will begin debate on 3 district court nominees. There will then be up to 3 roll call votes on the nominations. Then the Senate will resume consideration of the House message to accompany H.R. 4213, the debt-extending “tax extenders bill”. No votes are scheduled for today. Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed cloture on the extenders bill.

President Obama is set to address the nation from the Oval Office tonight about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. But it appears that won’t be the entire focus of his remarks. According to Politico, “President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies plan a major new push for a broad global warming bill, fueled in part by public outrage over the BP disaster, according to top aides. Joel Benenson, a pollster for the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s presidential campaign, argues in a new briefing for top Capitol Hill officials that a comprehensive energy bill ‘could give Democrats a potent weapon to wield against Republicans in the fall.’ . . . Obama plans to include a call for an energy bill in his Oval Office address about the Gulf on Tuesday night. And the Obama administration has told key senators that ‘an energy deal must include some serious effort to price carbon as a way to slow climate change,’ according to a Senate Democratic leadership aide.”

Speaking on the floor this morning, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell expressed his disappointment in these reports, saying, “Most Americans are baffled by all this. The crisis as they see it is a broken pipe at the bottom of the ocean, miles-long oil slicks, and threatened coastlines. The first thing they want to know is what the administration plans to do to plug the leak, clean up the oil, and mitigate the spill’s effects on the livelihoods of those affected. And yet day after day, as the oil continues to flow, what we hear about from the administration is how tough they plan to be with BP and now, apparently, how important it is that we institute a new tax that will raise energy costs for every single American but which will do nothing to plug the leak.”

Sen. McConnell noted, “Never has a mission statement fit an administration as perfectly as Rahm Emanuel’s ‘never allow a crisis to go to waste.’” Indeed, in an interview with Politico’s Roger Simon, Obama went as far as to compare the oil spill to 9/11. “Sounding reflective as he heads into a bruising electoral season, President Barack Obama told POLITICO columnist Roger Simon that the Gulf disaster ‘echoes 9/11’ because it will change the nation’s psyche for years to come. Obama — facing mounting criticism of his handling of the BP gusher, even from longtime allies — vowed to make a ‘bold’ push for a new energy law even as the calamity continues to unfold. And he said he will use the rest of his presidency to try to put the United States on a course toward a ‘new way of doing business when it comes to energy.’”

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out last week, “As policy, this is a non sequitur. Cap and trade will do little or nothing to end U.S. oil dependence. It will merely make a globally traded commodity more expensive domestically.” Further, the WSJ wrote, “As for the idea that cap and tax is the best way to punish BP and Big Oil, it'd be more convincing if [Democrats’ current energy/climate bill] hadn't been written in concert with ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and—bad-timing department—BP. ‘Ironically, we've been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months,’ [Sen. John] Kerry said in early May.”

The bottom line here is “Americans are saying two things at the moment: stop this spill and clean it up,” as Sen. McConnell said. “So with all due respect to the White House, the wetlands of the Bayou, the beaches of the coast, and our waters in the Gulf are far more important than the status of the Democrats’ legislative agenda in Washington. Americans want us to stop the oil spill first. And until this leak is plugged, they’re not in any mood to hand over even more power in the form of a new national energy tax to a government that, so far, hasn’t lived up to their expectations in its response to this crisis.”

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