When the Trump administration proposed a budget earlier this year that seemingly gutted the entire government, we took some solace in the knowledge that Congress was unlikely to enact the most extreme cuts. But there was one sneaky idea that has, unfortunately, found its way into both House and Senate versions of the budget.
After four decades of protections, the first Trump budget might open the door to drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. With one little instruction that the Senate Environment and Natural Resource committee find $1 billion to offset tax cuts elsewhere, and a similar yet exorbitantly higher $5 billion in the House, the age-old Alaskan battle has once again resumed. With deficits running in the hundreds of billions a year, this money is a drop in the bucket. So it’s not like it’s a key money maker for the public--but it would net plenty of profit for the oil industry.
At stake is some of the most pristine land in these United States, specifically a 1.5 million acre patch of the 19.6 million acres of caribou habitat, a section of coastline teeming with marine mammals, and more importantly, home to the Gwich’in people. “It’s a sin against the environment,” Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) told Bloomberg. “We don’t need to set up a gas station on top of the ANWR.”
President Dwight Eisenhower was the first to protect the land in 1960. Since then, friends of the fossil fuel industry have tried time and again to open it to drilling. Time and again they have failed. A near-victory was vetoed by President Clinton in 1995--the closest the industry’s gotten to getting their way, until now.
Despite the Trump administration’s eagerness to please industry in any way possible, there remain a few hurdles to opening ANWR. Chief among them are Republican Senators McCain and Collins, who have both consistently voted against drilling in ANWR in the past. With their opposition, Pence would be needed to break the tie--the budget reconciliation process requires only a simple majority. With one additional Republican willing to put America’s lands and the Gwich’in people above the craven maw of the oil industry, ANWR will remain free from oil derricks and pipelines.
Despite the procedural trick to avoid filibustering, this will still be a tough fight, to say the least. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) implied as much: he hinted to E&E that “there are some Republicans who at least expressed privately some distaste for opening up ANWR.” (We’re assuming he’s looking beyond McCain and Collins’s past public opposition.)
Given that recently unleashed Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) has expressed an opposition to anything that increases the deficit, which this budget arguably could, Republicans don’t have much room to maneuver here. They need to weigh whether the ANWR funds, a drop in the bucket of the deficit, are worth the potential loss of the votes of McCain, Collins and one other senator who would consider this a poison pill.
Now if you find it morally distasteful that this decision is slipping through the reconciliation process on must-pass budget legislation instead of being debated in full on its own merits in a filibuster-able 60-vote normal order bill, well… looks like all is unfair in love ANWR.
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