Ah, Huntington Beach with its smelly smokestacks, oily bathtub-ring-like shoreline and human waste bobbing in the ocean. What's not to love? Your congressman, the esteemed Dana Rohrabacher (R-Abramoff), certainly showed he's got your back, Surf City-zens, as he voted just last night to let those poor, starving, raggamuffin oil companies drill for natural gas off the California coastline. Unfortunately for you hicks, a higher slice of the rest of the House–including scores of members of Dana's own party, including some members of Dana's own party from Orange County!!!–voted against the measure. Seems that those Congresspeoples have voters who actually hold their representatives' feets to the oil fires.
More specifically, what the House did was defeat an amendment to the appropriations bill to fund the Interior Department, Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies for the current fiscal year. The amendment by Rep. John Peterson (R-Pennzoil) would have lifted a 20-year ban on drilling for natural gas in the Outer Continental Shelf, an area off of United States shores, including California's. Peterson argued that soaring natural gas prices could spark a recession if more sources for fuel are not found. He added that such drilling could occur without harming the environment, a notion that was met with heavy skepticism by the heretofore mythical Progressive wing of the House. However, this is an election year and voters might not feel any sympathy for further enriching Big Oil. Thus, 93 Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the amendment and for protecting sensitive coastal and marine areas along California, Florida, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New England, and the entire Atlantic coast. The moratorium on natural-gas drilling stands.
Hey, Surf City: Remember how fun that was years ago scrubbing glops of spilled tanker oil off dying seabirds? Good times! We're not saying that, had your congressman got his way, pockets of natural gas would have been lapping your shores, perhaps mixing in with and killing the crapola that's already in there to create actual clean water–or Godzilla. No, what we're saying is the only fellow Orange County congressman to join Rohrabacher in backing Big Oil was former home builder Gary Miller (R-Diamond Bar), who cast his vote while taking a breather in between beating defenseless immigrants. But their votes were offset among the Orange County GOP delegation by, in a too-rare display of conscience, the guy Pat Boone calls bland, Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) and toll-road backing land profiteer Ken Calvert (R-Riverside, South County and Blowjob Alley). Meanwhile, flip-flopping nothingburger John Campbell (R-Newport Beach and under his desk, with his fingers in his ears, going “Nah-nah-nah”) did not vote. And soooooo, when the lone OC Democrat (not lone OC Democrat congressperson; the lone OC Democrat period) Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove, Pacific Palisades and Playboy Mansion) did as expected in voting no, the total OC congressional delegation actually voted against Big Oil and offshore drilling, 3-2.
Our whole world is upside down!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.