McConnell: We block what makes the problem worse

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell answered Democratic charges of obstructionism on energy policy on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News Channel show yesterday by pledging to obstruct initiatives that would make the problem worse. Presumably, these objections centered on McConnell’s takedown of Lieberman-Warner, which actually had less to do with that bill than Harry Reid’s broken promise to get more judicial nominations confirmed, which I discussed with Senator McConnell on Monday’s show:

What have the Democrats proposed? An emissions-rationing system and a windfall-profits tax. Both proposals make energy more expensive, not less. Both proposals burden domestic production of oil, not encourage it. Both proposals would lead America deeper into the energy crisis while blathering about renewable solutions that have no practical application for mass production, now or in the near future.

Both Cavuto and McConnell say that they don’t see this as a partisan issue, and until now they’ve been largely correct, but only because Republicans have proven themselves as deaf as Democrats to Americans on the issue of domestic production. Only now have Republicans started to see that championing American production could be a political winner, as patience with environmentalist sensitivities has finally expired under the thundering hooves of runaway price increases. McConnell mentions the polling on this, in which a substantial majority want to allow oil companies to find our own oil rather than beg the Saudis for more of theirs.

If Democrats allow Republicans to take leadership on this issue, they may have some unpleasant surprises in store this November, in an election they should win, expecially at the Congressional level. Americans understand that the real obstruction has been to domestic oil production, not dangerous rationing mechanisms, and that obstruction has gone on for far too long already.