One by one, other senators came forward last week to say much the same thing about this terrible bill. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said it would do "nothing to lower energy prices or improve our energy security."
When Obama or his supporters talk about energy, they never breathe a word about "production," that is, increasing the supply of oil and gas to bring down prices. Corker, applying a little Tennessee horse sense, told his colleagues we need more "oil and gas production" and gasoline "refinery capacity." Exactly.
These were the core elements in the Republican alternative bill offered by New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici: expand oil refineries to boost gas inventories, open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to safe, surgical drilling and give states the option to explore off their outer continental shelf and reap the royalties.
Republicans once passed legislation to drill in ANWR, but President Clinton vetoed it in 1995. If he had signed it, Hutchison said, "we would be pumping the same amount of oil that we import from Saudi Arabia every day, and we would not (be paying) $4 a gallon at the pump."
Why are we in this mess? It isn't because liberal Democrats have the support of voters on this issue. A Gallup poll found that 57 percent of Americans support "drilling in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas now off limits."
We're in this mess because of a dark ideological mindset now controlling the levers of power in Congress that is hostile to the oil companies in particular, and to corporations in general.
Notably, the same poll found that fewer Americans are now blaming the oil companies for higher prices. Over the past year, the percentage that blames them has fallen from 34 percent to 20 percent or less, Gallup said.
In a paper that ought to be read by every lawmaker, Ben Lieberman, a senior energy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, says, "Good energy policy is easy to distinguish from bad energy policy. Good policy leads to more supplies of affordable energy and bad policy leads to less."
The next time you hear some politician talking about the energy crisis and saying nothing about boosting production or supply, that's going to be a very bad policy. It's as simple as that.