….legislatively speaking.  After all, ya can’t drill without ‘em:

While lifting a twenty-five-year federal ban on most offshore oil and natural gas drilling, the [House Democrat] legislation would block Virginia and other coastal states from sharing in a $2.6 trillion bonanza of tax revenue expected to flow from offshore fields. A Senate bill still in the works would give states part of the money.

Unless states stand to profit from offshore development, they almost surely would exercise their right under the bill to block any drilling within one hundred miles of their shores, critics of the House initiative charged.

“With no financial incentive, no state will choose to ‘opt in,’ ” House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio told reporters, “and this bill will result in little or no new American energy production.”

Representative Thelma Drake, a Norfolk Republican who has taken a prominent role among pro-drilling forces, was even more critical.

The new bill “appears to be little more than a political ploy,” Drake charged in a prepared statement. Democrats intend to “tell the American people that they voted to go after more American energy while winking to the environmentalists to say that this increased production will never happen,” she said.

Well, it was either this or my theory that Crazy Nancy’s mendatious myrmidons would quietly let the GOP drilling bill pass and allow their Senate counterparts to kill it. 

Problem with that angle is that the Senate has its own bipartisan (GRRRRR) anti-drilling bill, chock full of tax increases, job destruction, and - surprise! - a continuance of the OCR drilling ban.  It doesn’t have Pelosi’s poison pill because, well, it doesn’t need it.  Senate Donks and their RINO lapdogs can be open about it because the next Senate is going to be substantially “bluer” than this one no matter what they do, whereas the House majority is on potentially much shakier ground.  That creates a greater need for the Dems to finally, belatedly, and APPARENTLY deal with the energy crisis of their own creation while hiding within the seeds of its own sabotage.

How musical to the Speakerette’s ears must the frustrated lament of Representative John Peterson (R-PA) (”….no bill would be better than this legislation.”) have been.  In fact, while understandable, that was a REALLY poor choice of words, because if Nance acts upon them, she can offer the “compromise” of withdrawing her caucus’ “drilling” bill….and in exchange, requiring the withdrawal of the GOP alternative as well.  She could allow that knowing that the ban-restoring Senate bill would be forthcoming, the better to steal credit for sating the public’s demand to “drill here, drill now,” while neutralizing the Republicans’ best wedge domestic issue.

Frankly, with gas prices back down in the $3.75/gallon range from their mid-summer highs, the drilling issue has lost some of its urgency, just as I suspected it would.  And it’s been supplanted by the “Wall Street meltdown” as the top economic issue in any case, which John McCain isn’t handling with the greatest apolmb so far.

Will Nora Desmond’s revoltingly deceitful ploy succeed in dodging an asteroid-sized electoral bullet?  It shouldn’t, but sometimes the timing of events just doesn’t work in your favor.  Which, in this case, means House Pachyderms are going to have to trumpet even louder what a lying, perfidious caste squats in the People’s House, and what it’s going to cost American voters at the pump and in their monthly power and heating bills if the perveyors of that perfidy are rewarded instead of punished at the ballot box.

[cross-posted at ]