Cross-posted at BloggingForMichigan.com
Poor Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11). Twenty months into the 110th Congress, he still hasn't figured out that his party is in the minority and that Nancy Pelosi, not Dennis Hastert, is the Speaker of the House.
Last month, McCotter and a group of House Republicans vented their frustrations by holding a make-believe "session" of the House to "debate" energy "policy." (I'll have more to say about that circus in a future diary). Their "policy," in a nutshell, was to give the oil companies a blank check to drill wherever they pleased, facts be damned. One fact is that even assuming the oil companies did drill in places that are currently off-limits, the extra production would amount to a drop in the proverbial barrel and do little to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.
There's more beneath the Capitol dome...
Now that the real House is back in session and debating real energy legislation, McCotter is furious over the compromise introduced by the Democratic leadership. So furious in fact that he's dropped a resolution in the hopper (H. Con. Res. 471) expressing the sense of the House that it should not adjourn until it passes "comprehensive energy legislation."
According to McCotter, "comprehensive" means legislation that:
(1) opens the Outer Continental Shelf, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and oil shale reserves to environmentally prudent exploration and extraction;
(2) extends expiring renewable energy incentives;
(3) encourages the streamlined approval of new refining capacity and nuclear power facilities;
(4) encourages advanced research and development of clean coal, coal-to-liquid, and carbon sequestration technologies; and
(5) minimizes drawn out legal challenges that unreasonably delay or prevent actual domestic energy production.
These proposals come straight out of the National Energy Policy report (humongous pdf file), which was written in 2001 by a panel chaired by Dick Cheney and stacked with Bush cabinet appointees (including Energy Secretary Spencer Abrraham, who had recently been booted out of the Senate by Michigan voters). Some of the Cheney panel's recommendations have become law, but the Holy Grail remains expanding drilling to the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic. So this makes McCotter Dick Cheney's point man on Capitol Hill. How charming.
McCotter's resolution also takes the following cheap shot at Speaker Pelosi and her leadership: "Whereas, as announced by the congressional Democratic Majority, from August 1, 2008, through January 1, 2009, the 110th Congress will only work 14 session days in 5 months but receive their full salaries as legislators." But guess what? The previous Congress, with Republicans in the majority and Hastert in the Speaker's chair, was hardly a beehive of activity. An editorial in the December 7, 2006, Washington Post observed:
The 109th Congress will have been in session for a grand total of 103 days this year, which, as Lyndsey Layton pointed out in yesterday's Post, is seven days fewer than the "Do-Nothing Congress" of 1948. An ordinary full-time worker with a generous four weeks of vacation would have clocked 240 days of work during that same period.
I guess that's okay if you're a Republican.
And so is legislation by hissy fit, if McCotter's behavior is any indication.
Fortunately, Speaker Pelosi, who's both a mother and a grandmother, has certainly seen this kind of behavior before. When McCotter rises to introduce his resolution, she'll have a hard time resisting the temptation to say, "The chair recognizes the gentleman from Michigan for the purpose of holding his breath until he turns blue." Wouldn't that be fun to watch on C-SPAN?