opinion

GOP must get off corporate welfare

Some of our media friends gripe that Iowa is the wrong state to start the GOP presidential race because it’s full of social conservatives. The real reason it’s a bad place to start is because it’s the heartland of Republican corporate welfare.

Witness this weekend’s pander fest known as the Ag Summit, in which the potential 2016 candidates competed to proclaim their devotion to the Renewable Fuel Standard and the 2.3-cent per kilowatt hour wind-production tax credit. The event was hosted by ethanol kingpin Bruce Rastetter, co-founder of Hawkeye Energy Holdings, who interviewed the candidates and made sure each one had a chance to light a votive candle to his cause.

“Don’t mess with the RFS,” declared Iowa’s GOP Governor Terry Branstad at the start of festivities, referring to the mandate that requires a minimum amount of renewables be blended into transportation fuels. Two of the biggest enthusiasts were Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, the social conservatives who won the last two Iowa presidential caucuses before sputtering in New Hampshire.

The fuel standard “creates jobs in small town and rural America, which is where people are hurting,” said Mr. Santorum, who must have missed the boom in farm incomes of recent years.

Scott Walker, who in 2006 said he opposed the renewable fuel standard, did a switcheroo and now sounds like St. Augustine. He’s for ethanol chastity, but not yet. The Wisconsin Governor said his long-term goal is to reach a point when “eventually you didn’t need to have a standard,” but for now mandating ethanol is necessary to ensure “market access.”

Jeb Bush at least called for phasing out the wind credit, which was supposed to be temporary when it became law in 1992. But he danced around the renewable standard, which became law when his brother signed the energy bill passed by the Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid Congress.

“The law that passed in 2007 has worked, for sure,” the former Florida Governor said, though he reckoned that the mandate may at some point prove moot because “ethanol will be such a valuable” product. Ethanol Nirvana is always just around the corner.

Chris Christie wouldn’t repudiate the wind tax credit, perhaps because in 2010 the New Jersey Governor signed into law $100 million in state tax credits for offshore wind production. He also endorsed the RFS as the law of the land, saying the President should do “what the law requires.” That’s nice, but what voters want to know is what Mr. Christie thinks the law should be.

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry sounded somewhat contrite for supporting the wind tax credit, which has been a boon for Texas energy companies. Now his default position is that states, not Washington, should pick energy winners and losers.

The only Ag Summiteer who flat-out opposed the RFS was Texas Senator Ted Cruz , who has also sponsored a bill in Congress to repeal it. In response to Mr. Rastetter’s claim that oil companies were shutting ethanol out of the market, he noted “there are remedies in the antitrust laws to deal with that if you’re having market access blocked.” Bravo.

Political cynics will say we’re, well, tilting at windmills by expecting politicians to swear off energy subsidies, but that merely proves our point about the Iowa caucuses. If they were thinking bigger, Republicans would understand that they’ll have more credibility to reform social welfare if they oppose corporate welfare.

— Wall Street Journal, March 9

Let Chief Joseph, Duniway represent Oregon

The ponderously named Statuary Hall Study Commission was no doubt happy last week to hand state lawmakers the final job of deciding which two historic figures should represent Oregon in a national collection on display at the U.S. Capitol.

The commission recommended that lawmakers select Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph and pioneering women’s rights activist Abigail Scott Duniway to replace pioneer Jason Lee, a 19th century missionary, and John McLoughlin, a fur trader known as the father of Oregon, as the state’s representatives in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C.

The decision to remove Lee and McLoughlin, whose statues have stood in the Capitol since 1953, was a relatively easy one. Few contemporary Oregonians can identify either, and their removal is unlikely to create more than a ripple of controversy.

Deciding who should replace them has been much harder.

In 2000, Congress passed legislation allowing states to reclaim and replace the original statues in the national collection. Supporters of Mark Hatfield, a former governor who represented Oregon in the U.S. Senate for 30 years, moved quickly to lobby for a statue of the late senator in the nation’s Capitol. In 2013, and again in 2014, the state House of Representatives approved legislation to bring the Lee statue back to Oregon and replace it with one of Hatfield.

After the bills died in the Senate, Gov. John Kitzhaber appointed a commission to study the issue. After recommending that the statues of both Lee and McLoughlin be returned to yet-to-be identified “places of honor” in Oregon, the panel tackled the thankless job of deciding who should represent Oregon.

The commission heard public testimony and worked with historians, and narrowed a lengthy list of candidates to four in December — Hatfield, Chief Joseph, Duniway and Tom McCall, a charismatic former two-term governor whose leadership on environmental issues helped produce the country’s first “bottle bill,” won passage of a law maintaining public ownership of the state’s beaches and created the first statewide land-use planning system.

All four were excellent nominations, although some were not happy about the omission of notables such as former Sen. Wayne Morse. And this newspaper suggested the commission consider livening up the Capitol with a less conventional choice — perhaps a statue of an Oregon writer such as Ken Kesey or an athlete such as the meteoric Steve Prefontaine.

In the end, the panel decided to recommend Chief Joseph and Duniway. Strong arguments can be made for both. Chief Joseph, who lived from 1840 to 1904, was leader of a band of the Nez Perce tribe that courageously resisted removal by the U.S. government from their Wallowa Valley homeland during the 1877 Nez Perce War. Duniway, who lived from 1834 to 1915, was known as “the pioneer woman suffragist of the great Northwest.”

Chief Joseph and Duniway would make welcome additions to the National Statuary Hall, where women and Native Americans are in short supply and white males are more than well represented.

It’s likely that supporters of Hatfield and McCall won’t give up the fight. That’s understandable, given their impressive accomplishments. But lawmakers would be on sound footing if they follow the commission recommendations — the result of much study and debate — that Chief Joseph and Duniway represent Oregon in Washington, D.C.

— The Register-Guard, Eugene, March 9