Too Good To Be True, & It Was

When I read this story yesterday (via CQ) I literally leaped out of my chair pumping my fist saying, "YESSSSSS!"

It's an audacious power play, even for Senator Ted Stevens.

The wily and cantankerous Alaska Republican is trying to secure the mother of all pet projects for his state: oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Stevens has attached the provision to a popular defense spending bill and has put holiday plans of his Senate colleagues on hold as he dares Democratic and moderate Republican opponents to vote against it. ...

Even more ominous for impatient senators, he appeared to be in no rush. "I could go all month," Stevens said on the Senate floor Monday. "I've been with it for 25 years."

Cap'n Ed loved it too. I'll let you take a crack at identifying the caveat in his post that came acropper today:

We finally have a GOP Senator who hasn't put "comity" as the overriding concern of their service in Congress, but in actually getting things done. ANWR drilling makes sense and has the support of a clear majority in both houses of Congress. The only hurdle has been Democratic obstructionism by filibustering the legislation every time it comes up, an undemocratic but legal maneuver for that chamber.

Now, however, the GOP has played hardball by attaching ANWR to an unfilibusterable bill, one that if rejected would defund the DoD while we're at war and American troops fight in the field. This bill also got endorsed by a joint conference committee and passed overwhelmingly in the House, putting even more pressure on Democrats to pass it. Reid's threats have caused Bill Frist to back down in the past to maintain the old-boy nature of debate in the Senate, but Stevens has had enough of delaying tactics over 25 years on ANWR. He makes it clear that Christmas in DC sounds just fine to him, and he'd like nothing better than to celebrate the holiday with 99 of his closest co-workers ... and not just the Senators, of course, but their staffers and volunteers, and so on.

Stevens is putting on a school for hardball for his Republican colleagues, who in several conflicts with Reid and the Democrats have shown a burning need for such an education. Stevens may have his flaws, but in this case, he's absolutely right.

Figured it out yet? Give up? Okay, here it is: "...the GOP has played hardball by attaching ANWR to an unfilibusterable bill, one that if rejected would defund the DoD while we're at war and American troops fight in the field."

Well, guess what? The Democrats filibustered it. They threatened to defund the Department of Defense while we're at war and with American troops fighting in the field in order to kill expanded domestic energy exploration (again). Why? Because they calculated that when eyeball came to eyeball, Republicans wouldn't have the balls to make them go through with it. So they called the majority's bluff, and the GOP caved (again).

Bottom line: the Republicans were bluffing, and the Democrats were not. And if the former had forced the latter to make good on its threat to pull the plug on all defense funding, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Donks and their media allies would have used it to try and turn the pro-military tables on us by charging that GOPers were "holding our troops hostage to the further enrichment of their Big Oil buddies" or some such. John Kerry said something very similar to that on the Senate floor this afternoon.

It reminds me uncomfortably of the second government shutdown back in the winter of 1995-96, which Bill Clinton skillfully turned against the GOP and used to vault his way to re-election the following November. Doubtless more than a few Pachyderms were thinking the same thing.

The difference is the Democrats do not have Bill Clinton, nor a majority in either house of Congress. With President Bush finally, and fully, engaged in the fray, I think the Democrats could have been forced to blink because they would have been committing political suicide to persist with a filibuster in those circumstances. It would have been their own version of the aforementioned government shutdown.

Instead, what they do have is the same thing they had ten years ago: effective control of Congress and the national agenda despite their paucity of numbers because Republicans are incapable of playing the kind of hardball it takes to smash these Menshevik imbeciles once and for all.

And so we remain ever more dependent on imported oil from sources like Islamist Iran and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela that could be cut off on a dictator's whim at pretty much any time, and Red China's and India's petrothirsts continue to drive oil (and, therefore, gas pump) prices ever higher, and Democrats only prooffered solution is windmills and pipedreams and blaming everything on George W. Bush.

I think Republicans approach the political war with the Democrats the same way Bill Clinton viewed the terror war with al Qaeda and friends: they want to duck it all costs. Makes me wonder what it will take before every Republican understands and accepts that the "war" is inescapable - or if they'll do so while they're still in a position to fight it.