Pelosi looks to load up drilling bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may be ready to allow a vote on offshore drilling, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to make it easy on the Republicans who’ve been goading her for weeks on energy.

As she announced her willingness to hold a drilling vote Monday night, she stressed that it would have to be part of a larger energy package. And the contents of that package might include some items that would be tough for Republicans and the energy industry to swallow, like a renewable portfolio standard and the Democrats’ signature “use it or lose it” legislation.

{mosads}Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.) said that if both sides in Congress have to agree to terms they don’t like, the energy debate will be a success.

“This is going to be one of those situations where people are saying, ‘I don’t like that, but I do like this,’ ” Altmire said. “That’s how you do good legislation.”

Democratic leaders are expected to begin discussing the shape of the package in a conference call Wednesday.

Republicans, who have staged a sit-in of sorts on the House floor for more than a week in order to demand an immediate drilling vote, greeted Pelosi’s gesture with deep skepticism.

“If Speaker Pelosi is truly sincere about having a vote on deep-ocean oil and gas drilling to help bring down fuel costs, she should use her power as Speaker to call Congress back into session immediately and schedule a vote on the American Energy Act,” Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement released Tuesday morning.

Both Boehner and House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said the protest on the floor will continue.
Republicans are demanding a vote on the entire Republican energy plan, which includes drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

“We are asking that she bring our American Energy Act up for a vote,” said Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), who on Tuesday morning led nine Republicans to the House floor for their 10th day of protests. “If she brings it up under regular order, then amendments will be allowed and we’ll have that debated. What we want is a chance to have that debate and have a vote.”

Pelosi intentionally timed her reversal on CNN’s “Larry King Live” to fall well before the political intensity of the party conventions and into a news cycle dominated by the Olympics.

{mospagebreak}She realized a vote was inevitable because the offshore moratorium expires at the end of September, a Democratic leadership aide said, and requires congressional renewal. Also, in response to a Senate compromise plan, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) has indicated willingness to consider offshore drilling.

Pelosi, who’d already started to signal the change by cutting vulnerable freshman members loose to vote their political best interests on drilling issues, was under increasing pressure from vulnerable Democrats who wanted a vote.

As voters’ anger intensified this summer on high gas prices, Republicans had found that drilling in new areas was a political windfall. Republicans found their natural inclinations aligned with the polls in a year in which even they are expecting to lose 10 House seats, and likely more.

{mosads}According to a Gallup poll in late July, 57 percent of Americans surveyed said they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports easing restrictions on offshore drilling. Still, the poll found 58 percent more likely to vote for one supporting a windfall profits tax, and 67 percent more likely to vote for one supporting tax incentives for energy conservation.

Seizing the advantage despite minority status, the GOP forced Democrats to go to great lengths to avoid a drilling vote, all but canceling the appropriations process and resorting to parliamentary gimmicks to avoid drilling amendments.

But Pelosi’s drilling announcement indicated that she’s made a tactical move, not an unconditional surrender.

She stressed that drilling will have to be a part of a larger package that would include many elements that have been resisted by Republican members and leaders. A leadership aide said many of the energy proposals that were put forward by Democrats in July would wind up in the package. Many of them won majority House support but failed because of a parliamentary maneuver used to block GOP amendments.

In the CNN interview, she indicated that drilling, which she’s opposed for years, could be accompanied by “great things” like expansion of wind power, solar energy and biofuels. She hinted that the package could include the Democratic leadership’s “use it or lose it” plan to force drillers to produce their existing federal leases, more regulation of greenhouse gases, and that the federal government should get more money for the oil.

“It has to be part of something that says we want to bring immediate relief to the public and not just a hoax on them,” Pelosi said.

She was even more emphatic that it would include a renewable electricity standard, a requirement that a certain percentage of electricity must be generated with renewable energy. The standard has faced broad Republican opposition. And she specifically mentioned releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which also faces Republican resistance.

Their inclusion is not an attempt to load the package with deal-killers that Republicans couldn’t support, a leadership aide said.

“If those are poison pills, they’re not serious,” the aide said. “If those are poison pills, they don’t understand the word ‘compromise.’ ”