Last week, the House was denied the opportunity to improve a bill that sought to bleed 70 million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Dems use rules to keep lid on oil drilling

Putting aside whether Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel was unfairly denied the Heisman Trophy last December, the resolution the House considered this week honoring Florida’s Tim Tebow for being selected as college football’s 2007 MVP didn’t engender much opposition. Neither did the one congratulating the University of Tennessee’s women’s basketball program for winning its eighth national championship; nor the one naming a post office in upstate New York.

That’s why each of these bills was shuffled through the House under a policy known as “suspension of the rules,” an expedited process for handling noncontroversial legislation requiring the approval of two-thirds present to pass. The only trade-off? Debate time is severely restricted, and not a single amendment may be offered or considered on the floor.


But whereas the suspension calendar used to be the near-exclusive province of athletic acknowledgements and postal taxonomy, the majority leadership has taken to employing the process for a new purpose these days: bringing up controversial energy legislation designed to deny their own members — and ours — any chance to add a single gallon of new American energy to the pipeline.

The strategy was on display last month, as Democrats suspended the rules to call up their discredited “Use It or Lose It” bill. A week later, the House voted on — but barely even spoke about — a bill to “unlock” 24 million Alaskan acres where we have already been drilling wells for more than a generation. Then, last week, the House was denied the opportunity to improve a bill that sought to bleed 70 million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve — all because Democratic leaders were afraid to debate the merits of unlocking billions of barrels of American energy from other, more abundant sources.

Now, with only two legislative days remaining before Congress takes off for the summer, reports indicate we’ll see the fourth iteration of this strategy this week — in the form of a bill to punish “speculators” for betting that Congress’ 27-year-old ban on accessing American energy for American consumers will remain in place.

But it’s not nameless, faceless speculators who are denying billions of barrels of American oil from reaching the consumer markets — that dubious honor belongs to Congress alone. And it’s not that genuine, bipartisan solutions to our current energy crisis don’t exist; it’s just that not a single one of them has been permitted to see the light of day.

Nor has the fear that has gripped the majority over the prospect of debating a legitimate energy policy been limited to hiding behind the suspension calendar. The congressional appropriations process has also been indefinitely shelved — if and until the majority can figure out a way to silence the growing chorus of members demanding that Congress allow an up-or-down vote on pro-energy measures.

For his part, Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) has argued the appropriations process is no place to hold a debate on the need to explore for more American energy. But that rationale falls flat when one considers that it’s in his legislation — the Interior spending bill — where the 27-year-old ban on accessing America’s abundant reserves of deep-ocean energy resides. It’s also where you’ll find a provision preventing the Interior Department from spending one thin dime on the environmental assessment work needed to develop the potentially 800 billion barrels of oil shale that lay dormant out West.

But while Democrats continue to demonstrate that you can run from the energy debate, time will show — and the American people will ensure — that you cannot hide from it. Not when motorists are being forced to shell out $4 per gallon for gasoline; not when truckers are spending more than a $1,000 a week on diesel fuel; not when the American people open their electricity bills in October; not when our dangerous dependence on foreign energy is transferring hundreds of billions of dollars a year to countries around the world with strategic interests diametrically opposed to ours.

Now is the time to debate the status of our current energy policy — not tomorrow, not when we return from recess, not after a new president is sworn into office. And to ensure we have that debate, Republicans will fight this week to prevent Democratic leaders from shutting down the chamber for the whole month of August.

But whether we have that debate will depend on the degree to which Democrats genuinely want to find a solution. The substance of what we expect to see on the floor this week suggests they are not.



Rep. Roy Blunt is the Republican whip of the House and is in his sixth term serving Missouri’s 7th Congressional District.