Tom Price and Mike Pence don’t look like political arsonists but these two Republican congressmen, representing Georgia and Indiana respectively, have sparked a potential political wildfire.
They may also have set in motion a totally unexpected sequence of events that could salvage their party as an effective tool for achieving desperately needed conservative reforms in the nation’s capital.
That’s two very impressive possibilities for a couple of nice guys from Middle America. For the record, however, let’s not forget that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid deserve some credit here, too.
It was, after all, their stark terror at the prospect of Congress voting on the defining issue of the moment that set the stage upon which Pence, Price and a plucky band of fellow GOP conservatives smartly strode, speeches in hand, to challenge vacationing Democrats to get their tails back here and do their jobs.
But before anybody gets too excited, let’s keep in mind that the possibilities remain just that, possibilities, because Republicans tend to be, well, Republicans. This is especially worrisome because a political knife fight is brewing over lifting the congressional ban on oil and natural gas drilling in the outer continental shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Democrats always bring knives, switchblades and other sharp instruments to such gatherings, while most GOPers bring their well-thumbed copies of “The Gentleman’s Guide to Not Rocking Boats.” Still, the terrain on which this fight will happen could not be better for the GOP.
What the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger dubbed the “enviro-maniacs” of the Democratic Party includes Pelosi and Reid. In their hearts of hearts, they love $4-a-gallon gas because it forces Americans to trade their sport utility vehicles for mass transit and forsake their suburban castles for the crowded, noisy, crime-ridden big cities.
The enviro-maniacs know the fight over the ban isn’t just about drilling. What this really is about is whether the prairie chicken’s “view shed” remains a higher public policy priority than keeping American energy dollars at home, rather than sending them to the sheiks, bunco artists and thugs of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Not familiar with the prairie chicken’s view shed? It’s what the creature sees when it looks up during mating season. Supposedly, prairie chickens don’t care for the artistic symmetry of a producing well, so drilling is banned more than half the year in the energy-rich areas of Wyoming and other Western states where the birds live.
Lift the drilling ban and much more than the price of gas will come down: Things like the willingness of most Americans to keep putting up with government policies and officials who think prairie chickens deserve more consideration than people.
Amazingly, the House Republicans need only enough votes to prevent passage of legislation extending the ban. But here’s the catch. Most likely, it will be a continuing resolution containing the extension. That’s where we find out if the Republicans have the guts to win this fight because the government could shut down without a CR.
Bullheaded Democrats will scream and yell, threatening to deprive Republicans of every earmark. We’ll also see them shed rivers of crocodile tears over the widows, single mothers and orphans who will allegedly go hungry because of those evil Republicans. Those arguments scared the GOP into submission in 1995.
So, the only way the GOPers will win is if they steel themselves and the public by connecting the dots while the “Guerilla Congress” is being watched. They’ve got to say it over and over again: Drill here, drill now, stop environmental extremism.
It’s the environmental extremism of the enviro-maniacs that have made it all but impossible to produce more domestic energy supplies. They’ve also made traffic congestion a daily nightmare for millions of Americans by saying no to new roads.
Their “smart growth” policies drive housing costs up, their worship of judicial power and litigation deprives people of the fruits of honest labor and their bureaucratic obsessions destroy millions of jobs.
If they connect these dots now, it won’t be Pence, Price and the GOP energy rebels with a government shutdown crisis hanging around their necks.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog.
