Sunday, May 31, 1998

Teaching a lesson about Texas jobs, U.S. Constitution

By Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison

When I read Molly Ivins' second article on the big, bad energy industry and how mean it is to Texas, I had to go back and look at my 1998 Texas Almanac to remind myself that those meanies provide jobs to more than 200,000 Texans directly and countless thousands of others indirectly.

I suppose there are columnists in Kansas who think farmers are bad and columnists in Michigan who think auto industry workers are trouble. If so, I assume they enjoy swapping ideas with Ms. Ivins about how to undermine the economy in their states and take jobs away from their readers.

In the meantime, I plead guilty to Ms. Ivins' charge of trying to stop unelected bureaucrats in Washington from changing U.S. law to significantly impact thousands of Texas jobs.

I am further at fault for upholding the Constitution, in which Line 1 of Section 1 of Article I says, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." Try as I may, I can't find the section that talks about the legislative powers of the Minerals Management Service or other unelected, unaccountable agencies.

Putting aside my desire to want to teach Ms. Ivins Texas Economy 101 and Civics 101, there are one or two points in her column that deserve a little clarification.

n Ms. Ivins stresses the number of public hearings the Minerals Management Service held regarding the proposed new regulation. While such hearings are commendable, this is a necessary but not sufficient action to actually change a regulation. The agency was also required to report to Congress -- and failed to do so.

Despite Ms. Ivins' attempts to describe MMS activities as sufficient, the simple fact is that the agency ignored proper procedure. In fact, Sen. Frank Murkowski, chairman of the committee to which MMS should have been reporting (Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources), applauded the efforts a bipartisan majority of the appropriations committee took to delay this new regulation.

n Ms. Ivins talks about the supposedly bargain-basement price of $25 an acre for which the MMS leases tracts in the deep water of the Outer Continental Shelf to drillers. What she failed to mention is that this is the minimum bid allowed by the government. In general, the bids are much higher for these acres and the MMS has the right to turn down any bid it determines is too low. In fact, the average high bid in the last lease sale in the Central Gulf was $183 per acre, or seven times the minimum Ms. Ivins portrays as normal. Some bids go as high as $4,000 per acre.

Congress has spoken on this issue last fall and again this month. The president signed the relevant legislation both times. As much as it may pain Ms. Ivins and unelected bureaucrats, that's the way our system operates. And that's good for all Texans -- even Ms. Ivins.