The Push for Oil

The Northwoods Politic

President Bush today has lifted the executive ban on offshore oil drilling. He's been pushing Congress to allow for the drilling of offshore oil deposits on the U.S. continental slopes. There are both executive and Congressional ban on drilling offshore, but he's hoping that by lifting the executive ban he can push Congress into lifting theirs.

There are two parties that both have fundamental differences in opinion on how this will affect energy prices. One party says this will bring the high cost of fuel prices down. The other side says this is mostly hype and it is just a matter of the first party taking advantage of people's fears that we need to do anything and everything to bring these prices down, because they just can't afford to pay these prices for fuel. What the true facts are is hard to tell. If you read about the companies that make these big drilling platforms needed to extract the oil from our continental slopes, they state that they are already backlogged 5 years on orders for other countries so it would be 5 years before they would even be able to start building the oil platforms to use in the U.S. On top of that, some say that the oil companies hold leases on all kinds of land with viable oil reserves that they are not drilling already.

Again as always, this is an issue that runs along Republican and Democratic party lines, with mostly Republicans wanting the drilling and Democrats not wanting drilling. This is one of the biggest problems in our government. We can't seem to have all these people sit down, look at the facts, and come up with what they think is good or not good. After deciding what their stance is, they should go back to their districts and try to persuade their constituents to what they think is right, but their main job after that is to take what views their constituents decide back to Washington and reflect that in their vote on the issue before Congress. Instead the top person, in this case the president, decides what he wants and all the rest of the people in their party fall in line behind him, they say this is what they want too, and they vote on the issue in Congress to reflect their party's will. Most of these people that we are talking about are addressed as Representatives, the reason they are addressed by that title is that they are supposed to represent the people from their districts. The way this has been working is a major flaw in the way our government is supposed to work.