Blood on the Tundra, Betrayal in the Rotunda

For the past quarter century, there's been an annual ritual on Capital Hill. Each spring, with the regularity of migrating warblers, the oil lobby bursts into the halls of congress with a scheme to open to drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, perched on the northern rim of Alaska on the ice-bound Beaufort Sea. This seasonal onslaught prompts the big eco groups to frenzied action, unleashing a blizzard of emergency fundraising appeals adorned with shots of caribou and polar bears, pleading with their members to send money immediately in order to "save the refuge". Year after year, the face off has ended in a stalemate, with the politicians pocketing cash from both sides.

Now this dance is over. After emerging from their closed door session on the fabricated intelligence used to sell the Iraq war (supposedly evidence of spinal-column regeneration by Democrats), the Senate proceed to once again doom the nation's most treasured wildlife refuge. With a 51-48 pro-drilling vote yesterday on a deviously-crafted line item in the U.S. Senate's budget bill, the oil industry has seized its most prized trophy: access to reservoirs of crude beneath the 1.5 million-acre wildlife refuge on the Arctic plain.

ANWR used to be an icon of the power of the environmental movement. Now it stands as a symbol of its impotence. With ANWR, the most sacrosanct stretch of land in North America, now pried open to the drillers, everywhere else, from the Rocky Mountain Front to the coasts of Florida, Oregon and California, is fair game.

It didn't come easy and in the end it took a feat of procedural prestidigitation and the participation of a few well-placed Democrats to seal ANWR's fate.

Over the last decade, as the Republicans' grip on Congress has tightened, the fate of ANWR has depended on the judicious invocation of the filibuster by anti-drilling forces in the senate. Even as the drilling block gained a majority, they were never able to muster the 60 votes needed for cloture, and the measure was repeatedly abandoned in the doldrums of limitless senate debate.

In the past, ANWR measures have originated in the appropriations and energy committees. But this time, the drilling scheme was secreted inside the rules for the 2006 congressional budget resolution, which protected the proposal from blockage by a filibuster.

This bit of legislative trickery was devised by Senator Ted Stevens. On the eve of the senate vote, Stevens told his hometown paper, the Anchorage Daily News, that he had been suffering from "clinical depression" for the past three years over his inability to nail ANWR. "I'm really depressed, as a matter of fact, I'm seriously -- I'm seriously depressed," Stevens told the News. "Unfortunately, clinically depressed. I've been told that, because I've just been at this too long, 24 years arguing to get Congress to keep its word. I'm really getting to the point where I'm taking on people even in my own party that do things that I don't think is fair. You get to that point where you're challenging your colleagues -- that's not exactly good. I really am very, very disturbed."

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