If the Great Debate Over Offshore Drilling Sounds Vaguely Familiar, it Should--But It's Time for a Happier Ending

Every U.S. presidential election has to have an antecedent, an earlier race that can serve up comparisons about the candidates and issues.  Horserace election coverage is portraying the 2008 contest as a replay of the 1952 election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. 

The candidates in both elections were non-incumbents facing an electorate grown weary of war and U.S. military occupation overseas.   Barack Obama is cast in the role of Stevenson, another Ivy-League educated Illinois senator who championed the politics of civility and appealed to educated liberals and professional “elites.”  The “straight-talking” war-hero John McCain is the all-around “man of the people,” according to his biographer, and heir to General Eisenhower, who incidentally spoke at the 1958 Naval Academy commencement where McCain graduated 894th out of 899.

But there is another obvious parallel yet to be discussed in the media.  In both the 1952 and 2008 general election campaigns, the centerpiece issue around which the parties and candidates postured was offshore oil.

Last June, as gasoline prices soared, McCain and congressional Republicans challenged Obama and Democratic leaders to a showdown over lifting the 27-year congressional moratorium on offshore drilling along most of the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).   McCain adopted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” as the basis of his energy policy.  President Bush followed McCain’s lead by lifting the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling.  Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially resisted any talk of lifting the congressional ban, but they have since softened their position provided that new offshore drilling is part of a broader energy package that would fund renewable energy by repealing certain tax breaks for oil companies.  A so-called “Gang of 20” alliance of ten Republican and ten Democratic senators, led by Senators Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), has proposed a plan along these lines.  Pelosi is brokering a similar compromise in the House.   Both might come up for debate and vote this week.

Compromise is tangible, but remains elusive.  Conservative Republicans and most oil companies balk at provisions that would be seen as a “tax increase” or concession to Democrats intent on limiting the industry’s access to undrilled frontiers where vast untapped reserves may lie.  More drilling, they insist, will relieve high oil prices and reduce American dependence on imports.  Democrats counter that no amount of drilling will replace oil imports, that coastal communities are too vulnerable to a potential spill, and that lifting the ban is a needless giveaway to Big Oil, which should be forced instead to drill on leases it has stockpiled in the Gulf of Mexico, the one area open to drilling and development.  “Use it or lose it” is the rejoinder issued by a faction of liberal House Democrats to McCain and Bush.  Meanwhile, the chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill!” at the Republican convention were met by the refrain “Spill, Baby, Spill!” from environmental activists descending on Capitol Hill last week.

The political polarization over offshore oil echoes an earlier debate at the dawn of the offshore age.  Fifty-six years ago, Eisenhower and Stevenson came down on opposite sides of the “Tidelands Controversy,” a bitter and protracted confrontation between coastal states and the federal government over control of Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), which oil companies desired to lease for oil exploration.  Whereas Stevenson sided with Harry Truman and the U.S. Supreme Court in favoring federal jurisdiction, Eisenhower embraced the “states rights” position supporting a congressionally legislated “quitclaim” of offshore “tidelands” back to the states, a measure Truman had twice vetoed.  

By 1952, both sides had hardened beyond compromise.  Proponents of federal control believed that the submerged lands were a valuable part of the national public domain that should not be turned over a small number of states, whose more corruptible officials would submit to the demands of the oil lobby and lease the lands in a reckless manner.  “Talk about stealing from the people,” thundered Harry Truman.  “It would make Teapot Dome look like small change.”

Advocates for state control viewed the Tidelands fight as part of a larger effort to resist the expanding assault by the federal government on free enterprise, private property, and “states rights.”  The coded but obvious subtext to the rallying cry of states’ rights was the brewing struggle over black civil rights in segregationist Texas and Louisiana.   The notorious political boss of Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish and national “Dixiecrat” leader, Leander Perez, led the states’ rights charge on the Tidelands for Louisiana.  Next door, the perceived betrayal of Texas citizens by an overbearing national government, and an all-or-nothing “no surrender, no retreat” stand on principle by their valiant defenders, played right in to the creation myth of the Republic of Texas. 

Democratic leaders in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida vilified Stevenson for his stance on the Tidelands.  “Remember the Alamo and the Tidelands oil grab!” was a common reaction to his speeches in Texas.  Having been first courted to run for the White House by Texas independent oilman Sid Richardson and his close associate, Robert B. Anderson, who were disenchanted with the direction of the national Democratic Party, Eisenhower rode the Tidelands to victory in Texas in 1952 with the help of turncoat Democratic governor Allan Shivers.  Thus the politics of oil helped pry the Lone Star State away from its “Yellow Dog” allegiance to the Democrats.  

In early 1953, just as Eisenhower settled into the White House, Congress took up the Tideland’s issue.  After the longest Senate filibuster in U.S. history staged by the Democrats, Congress passed and Eisenhower signed the Submerged Lands Act, which quitclaimed ocean territory three miles from the coast back to the states (Texas eventually acquired jurisdiction over three leagues, or 10.4 miles, based on historical claims dating to the Spanish empire).  The act was seen initially as a victory for Texas, Louisiana, and other coastal states.  Over time, however, the fruits of victory were revealed to be paltry compared to the amount of oil and gas discovered on the federal OCS.  For more than fifty years, none of the substantial revenue generated by federal offshore leasing -- estimated at a total nominal value of approximately $140 billion -- would be shared with the coastal states.  Finally, in 2006, after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, the delegation from beleaguered Louisiana finally convinced Congress to approve a provision for kicking back meager funds to the Gulf Coast states. 

The fact that coastal states, which assume much of the environmental and economic risks of offshore development, received virtually nothing from leasing of the federal OCS, has fortified their resistance to new leasing.  A change in leasing policy in the early 1980s, introduced under President Reagan and Interior Secretary James Watt, which attempted to open up vast new areas for leasing without addressing the states’ demands for revenue sharing, shut down the leasing program outside Alaska and the Central and Western areas of the Gulf of Mexico.  The resulting “Seaweed Rebellion” by the states forced the enactment of restrictive leasing moratoria over ever more extensive expanses of the OCS.

It did not have to turn out this way.  Back in 1949, House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX) tried to broker a compromise that would have accepted federal control of the OCS but given the states a big share of the revenue generated from leasing – 2/3 of the revenue inside three miles and 37.5 percent beyond it (the same share the inland states received from mineral leasing on federal lands inside their boundaries).   It was a sensible solution to those politicians and oilmen wanting to move forward.  The Tidelands issue, however, could be too easily played for symbolic effect.  Leander Perez and Texas attorney general Price Daniel sabotaged the compromise, preferring to make political hay out of the issue in the service of enlarging their own power and furthering the cause of states rights and white supremacy.  The issue helped Perez preserve his personal financial interest in submerged oil lands around Plaquemines Parish and prolong the commitment to segregation in the Deep South.  Egged on by letters of support exclaiming such opinions as “High tide low tide Tidelands notwithstanding black lawyers or white day or night I am a Daniel man," and “the unjust and diabolical decisions in the Tidelands case and our segregation slaws are against God’s and highest human laws,” Daniel exploited the issue to win election first to the U.S. Senate and then to the Texas governorship.  As Rayburn predicted, the demagoguery of Perez and Daniel cost their states dearly in the long run.

The current wrangle over offshore oil is somewhat different.  Although an African-American man is the historic Democratic presidential nominee, race has nothing to do with the issue this time.  Nevertheless, the debate still boils down to Republicans and oil companies pushing to open up more of the OCS versus Democrats who prefer a higher degree of federal control. 

The ocean is the last frontier.   As was the case throughout American history, struggles over incorporating new frontiers into American society usually involved competing visions about defining property rights, the extent of the public sphere, and the nature of development.  Thus, these struggles can become ideologically charged and politically intractable, with both sides playing to the basest impulses on their fringe and imagining conspiracies working against them.  Like they did in 1952, politicians in 2008 are sharpening the issue into an election-year political weapon. 

Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike have made exaggerated claims about the effects of lifting the congressional moratorium.  The Democrats do this to appease their environmentalist and bi-coastal constituency and the Republicans to bolster their oil patch and nationalistic support.  Drilling here and drilling now, as the Republicans urge, will not reduce oil prices in the short term, if ever, or eliminate U.S. dependence on imports in the long term. With oil at over $100 a barrel, oil companies are doing everything they can to develop commercially viable leases in the booming deepwater Gulf of Mexico, but this is still not enough to replace declining national production.  Drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts promises to add to national supply, at a time when the United States and the world could use every spare drop, and it poses less ecological risk than liberal Democrats advertise.  Since the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, the U.S. offshore industry has developed extremely safe and environmentally sound methods of operating.  And drilling does not have to come at the expense of promoting alternative energy.  Both should be part of a broad-based search for solutions to our energy crisis.

As the United States and the world struggle to make energy supply meet demand, it would be a shame if the candidates and congressional leaders did not have the courage to back down from their extreme positions and work out a deal to open up new areas of the Continental Shelf for drilling, even if only to a limited extent.  This could set a precedent for bipartisan cooperation on formulating energy policy, something this nation has never really had before, and maybe produce sane conversations about our energy future, instead of belligerent ranting and chanting, which is all we have seen in the past.  Our energy security is too important to allow continuing policy paralysis, to which past disputes over offshore oil have been major contributors.

As the Tidelands saga demonstrated, the temptation to use the issue to mobilize the liberal and conservative bases may be too hard to resist.  Although the Democrats are searching for common ground and relaxing their opposition to lifting the drilling ban, the right wing, as it did nearly sixty years ago, is gearing up to take no prisoners.  John McCain’s running-mate selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, an exuberant advocate of drilling everywhere, is not an encouraging sign for compromise.  

Furthermore, many Republicans see a golden opportunity to end the congressional drilling moratorium outright without having to give an inch.  The moratorium expires, as it does every year, on September 30.  In the past, it always has been renewed as a rider on the appropriations bill.  But lameduck President Bush has promised to veto any renewal this year, and enough votes will probably not be found to override the veto.  Rather than a victory for the pro-drilling forces, however, this would ultimately lead to further political polarization, litigation by the states, and a continued paralysis in leasing.