Democrats to fight ANWR drilling in defense bill

By Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senate Democrats said on Thursday
said they will fight an effort by Republicans to use a
must-pass Defense Department budget bill to open Alaska’s
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Tapping into the refuge’s potential 10 billion barrels of
crude oil is a key part of the Bush administration’s national
energy plan to boost domestic petroleum supplies and reduce
America’s addiction to foreign oil imports.

Drilling supporters see attaching the ANWR provision to the
defense spending measure as their last-ditch effort to finally
give oil companies access to the refuge after a group of House
of Representative Republicans threatened to kill a separate
budget deficit reduction bill if that legislation contained the
drilling language.

Most Democrats are against drilling in the refuge and argue
the Defense Department budget bill should not be used to settle
the issue.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said if the ANWR
drilling language is in the defense spending legislation
Democrats would argue it violates Senate rules because the
provision is not related to defense issues. “The (Senate)
parliamentarian will rule in our favor,” Reid told reporters.

“It’s appalling that the United States Senate is willing to
hold our troops and hurricane victims hostage to their
desperate attempts to satisfy big oil and drill in the Arctic
Refuge,” said Democrat John Kerry.

“Debate about the future of the Arctic Refuge is a debate
about our failed energy policy and our environmental legacy,
not about the funding of our men and women and uniform, and it
would be grossly irresponsible to include the drilling
provision in the final Defense Appropriations bill,” said
Democrat Russ Feingold.

However, the defense spending measure is the only major
legislation moving through Congress that ANWR could hitch a
ride on, according to Republican Pete Domenici, the chairman of
the Senate Energy Committee and a major supporter of drilling
in the refuge.

“It’s clear (ANWR drilling is) not going in the budget …
If anything it’s going in the appropriations bill on defense,”
Domenici told reporters.

When Jeff Bingaman, the top Democrat on the Senate’s energy
panel, was asked if his fellow Democrats would filibuster such
a move, he responded: “I would be surprised if some did not.”

Republican Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens is pushing hardest to
get ANWR drilling into the defense budget bill.

His state would get half the estimated $10 billion in bonus
bids that energy companies might pay for the right to drill in
ANWR if oil prices were around $50 a barrel. The federal
government would get the other half.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said it would be “an
insult” if Republican leaders allowed ANWR drilling to be put
in the defense budget bill.

“Going right up to Christmas, to the last day, giveaways to
their oil and gas friends, drilling in the ANWR, and they will
taint the Department of Defense appropriations bill to do so,”
she said.

The Bush administration believes ANWR oil production could
eventually reach 1 million barrels a day. However, drilling
opponents want the refuge protected and say that raising
vehicle fuel standards would save the same amount of oil.

ANWR sprawls across 19 million acres, about the size of
South Carolina, and is home to caribou, polar bears, migratory
birds and other wildlife. About 1.5 million acres of the
refuge’s coastal plain would be opened to drilling under the
current congressional plan.