May 28, 2010 09:54 PM UTC

Drill Baby...Wait, Scratch That!

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Independent’s Dave Williams reports, Rep. Mike Coffman is acting out some serious chutzpah. How do you make this u-turn without whiplash?

U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman’s scathing attack on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Wednesday at a House Natural Resources Committee oversight hearing on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill sounded a little like a jewel thief berating the cops for not catching him sooner…

“Lax industry oversight of MMS contributed to what may turn out to be the single most significant environmental catastrophe in U.S. history,” [Coffman said].

“Can you with certainty tell me what assurances you can give to the American people going forward? Can you really change what is an incredibly dysfunctional agency? Where is the increase in oversight? Where is the new sheriff? The American people are seeking some assurances Mr. Secretary.”

…[S]ince his days as a Democratic Colorado senator, Republican lawmakers have been blasting Salazar for impeding everything from natural gas drilling on the Roan Plateau to oil shale production across northwestern Colorado and eastern Utah. Salazar often was simply pushing for better environmental practices to protect the state’s natural heritage.

Here’s Coffman from a September, 2009, committee hearing on the CLEAR (Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal) Act, at which he blasted Salazar for a series of steps to increase environmental protections before moving ahead with various domestic energy projects:

“So we can’t drill onshore, we can’t drill offshore, we can’t develop oil shale, we can’t develop nuclear and we can’t develop solar. Mr. Secretary, why won’t you let Americans develop American energy?” [Pols emphasis]

…In 2007, then Secretary of State Coffman very nearly accepted a gig as chairman of the radical pro-drilling Astroturf group Americans for American Energy but backed out at the last minute, according to the Rocky Mountain News.

Don’t try to make sense of the contradiction: the only thing we can think is it’s so ridiculous, people will assume there has to be something legitimate that nobody’s explained to them yet. After all, the people who have been insisting for years that the problem is too much oversight can’t possibly claim the problem now that something went wrong is not enough oversight–can they? Would Americans really buy something so patently absurd and hypocritical?

This isn’t meant to excuse Ken Salazar’s Interior Department for oversight failings that may have contributed to the present disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We didn’t defend Salazar’s assistant Tom Strickland after he committed the first major gaffe of this long crisis, and Salazar absolutely deserves the hard questions he’s answering right now about the Minerals Management Service (MMS)–an agency that was supposed to be at the top of his priority list.

But at some level, the fact that Coffman has absolutely no room to talk…still matters, folks.

Coffman, and other Republicans, had also better be careful about how far they are willing to go to attack Salazar the Obama Administration for the BP Oil Spill. The further they go in questioning the response, the easier they are going to make it for Democrats to push through significantly stronger regulations on drilling; surely the oil lobby is telling Republicans this, right?