Florida and Northeast GOP lawmakers block more debate - for now - on oil exploration in the gulf and in the Arctic.
By WES ALLISON, Times Staff Writer
Published November 11, 2005
Hear Gov. Jeb Bush's comments Thursday morning as he talks in Tallahassee to Times reporter Joni James about the failure to reach a compromise on offshore drilling.
By the time House Republican leaders adjourned in frustration late Thursday, assembling the votes for a crucial budget bill with national environmental implications had become like juggling ex-spouses in the seating chart at a wedding reception.
Twenty to 30 moderate Republicans, mostly from the Northeast, were threatening to vote against the budget if it included drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
A handful of Florida Republicans were balking at a deal to open the nation's coast - including Florida - to offshore drilling.
And some 40 conservative and western Republicans were threatening to vote against the bill if it didn't include provisions to allow drilling off the coast or in the Alaska refuge.
"Good team effort," said Rep. Jim Davis, D-Tampa, who recruited Republican allies from California and New York to oppose a compromise by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo. That plan would have allowed drilling up to 125 miles from the nation's coast and opened much of the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration.
"I think this is a national issue, and we got some help," Davis added.
Taken together, the two oil drilling proposals caused a rare fracture among normally disciplined House Republicans. And having both provisions stripped out of the budget bill, which will be taken up again next week without either one, marked a rare double victory in the House for environmentalists at the expense of President Bush, who has made expanding domestic drilling a priority.
Both drilling plans were part of a must-pass budget bill designed to cut spending by $50-billion. A vote had been scheduled for Thursday night, but House Republican leaders abruptly canceled it when the tussle over drilling jeopardized its passage.
The fight began after a handful of Florida Republicans worked with Florida Democrats, lawmakers from other coastal states, and moderate Republicans with environmentalist leanings to ensure the budget bill would die if the drilling provisions remained in it.
And in Florida, where GOP leaders needed the votes of most of the state's 18 Republicans to get the budget bill through, several supporters of the Pombo deal were threatening to revolt if the budget included drilling for Florida's coast, but not for the Alaskan refuge.
Under terms of the deal crafted by Bush and Pombo, after 2012 all U.S. waters would open to gas exploration as close as 25 miles offshore and to oil exploration as close as 50 miles. States such as Florida could then petition the U.S. Interior Department to keep drilling as far as 125 miles offshore.
The plan would have opened a vast swath of the eastern gulf about 213 miles from Tampa Bay, known as Lease Sale Area 181, to drilling immediately. Florida's eastern and southern coasts have no protection now.
Rep. Connie Mack, a Republican from Southwest Florida who had opposed the deal, worked with Pombo into the night to add more protections for Florida. Under a verbal agreement they reached, states would have had to petition the Interior Department to allow drilling, rather than to stop it.
The outer limit for protection also was pushed to 150 miles, while the current federal ban on drilling off the Gulf Coast would be extended from 2012 to 2019.
"So now it really was something that Florida controlled its destiny on," Mack said.
But the other Republican opponents of the original Pombo-Bush deal - Reps. Clay Shaw of Fort Lauderdale, Katherine Harris of Sarasota, Mark Foley of Palm Beach County and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami - refused to bless the new deal struck by Mack.
Harris said she liked many things about it, but she had pledged to oppose drilling and couldn't vote for the deal without first shopping it around her district. Harris and Shaw also noted there have been no hearings on any proposal to expand drilling.
"It deserved to be debated on its own merits and not thrown into the bill at the last minute, without giving citizens of Florida the opportunity to weigh in," Harris said.
At the same time, it's not necessarily feasible for Floridians to oppose any deal, she said. "We have to let them know what the consequences are of doing nothing."
Gov. Bush, who used his significant political clout to win backers for the compromise, said the decision to kill it was shortsighted.
"The folks that think they have a victory, it will be a short-term victory," Bush said. "This issue is not going to go away. ... I don't think there'll be a deal as good as that one."
But Mark Ferrulo, director of the Florida Public Interest Research Group, which has fought drilling for years, said the victory shows Bush's reasoning is wrong.
"What this proves is that losing isn't inevitable; we actually can win these fights," Ferrulo said.
The sour political cauldron now brewing in Washington certainly helped opponents of drilling. With Democrats united against the budget bill, which would find savings largely by cutting spending for education and welfare programs, Republican leaders could afford to lose the votes of just 13 of their own.
With re-election campaigns already under way, moderates in swing districts were green at the prospect of having to vote both for cuts to welfare programs and for oil drilling.
Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Republican leaders overreached.
"In the past they've been able to get away with it because moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans in the end caved," he said. "I think you're seeing a real backlash against that way of doing business here."
Mack, Davis and other lawmakers said they expect the offshore drilling deal to resurface soon. Over the next week, Pombo hopes to build support for his and Mack's version of the drilling deal among the Florida Republican holdouts, Pombo spokesman Brian Kennedy said.
"I don't see why we can't put this thing back together."
