The Senate took up a bill that would have stripped five integrated oil companies of their tax deductions today. As expected, the bill failed to garner the 60 votes needed to end debate. The Kaine campaign, which endorsed the measure earlier in the week, was eager to make as much hay out of the bill as possible, because it offered them an opportunity to chastise George Allen and other Republicans for being in big oil’s pocket:
“Unfortunately, by supporting these unnecessary subsidies, my opponent George Allen and other Republicans appear to be answering to the best interests of their campaign war chests instead of the best interests of the American people. By protecting these giveaways, Allen and his allies are double-charging Virginia consumers and businesses, asking them to pay at the pump and in their tax bill to Big Oil companies who don’t need the additional help to turn a profit.
Kaine can add Democrat Sen. Jim Webb to that list of double-charging no-goodniks, as Webb was among a handful of Democrats to vote against cloture, and effectively kill the bill.
Boom goes Kaine’s narrative.
And kaboom, too, goes the President’s narrative on the bill. In a Rose Garden speech today, the President urged the Senate to pass the bill and shift the deductions currently going to five integrated oils toward green energy.
It’s a consistent, if perhaps constitutionally dubious, position. The President has long favored green energy over fossil fuels. This bill has just another chapter in that story.
Except that in 2005, then-Senator Obama voted to extend tax breaks to the same companies he seeks to take away today. Watching his press secretary, Jay Carney, try to rationalize the President’s current statements with his senatorial voting record is a thing of twisted beauty.
The President, or perhaps his budget writers, managed to undercut himself further by slipping into his own version of the federal budget (that the House voted down 414-0) a provision that would have…cut the taxes of America’s five oil majors.
Take their deductions with one hand, give them right back with another, and hope no one notices.
Another local pol who might also be in the market for a new storyline is Democrat Sen. John Edwards, who spent the earlier part of the day carrying water for both the President and Mr. Kaine on this issue in Roanoke.
Jim Webb has upset all their apple cars, though Edwards managed to add to his own pain by standing up for the EPA’s new anti-coal regulations.
It’s enough of a fiasco for one to wonder whether the Democrats will continue to take their marching orders from John Podesta and Geoff Garin, the authors of the strategy memo that convinced Democrats they could win the energy issue by beating-up on big oil.
Perhaps they could. But first, they all have to agree to read from the same script — and make sure that past votes in favor of oil company tax breaks are never discovered, while proposed tax cuts for those same oil companies are kept very quite.
