This morning, we looked at an example of a congressional district where none of the candidates, including the incumbent, would acknowledge the current Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling disaster. Tim Holden and his challengers seem to be pretending that there’s no problem with offshore drilling, that there’s no oil spill threatening America’s shores.

However, this inaction isn’t universal in Congress. U.S. Representative Kathy Castor, from Florida’s 11th congressional district, including most of Tampa Bay, is dealing directly with the problem of offshore drilling.

What’s more, Representative Castor is willing to take her concerns straight to the top. She has, along with Representative Bill Young, written a letter to President Barack Obama urging that he reconsider his current embrace of Sarah Palin’s Drill Baby Drill approach to offshore drilling. Speaking of this letter, Representative Castor reflects, “We do not need any further reviews or studies to understand that the farther oil drilling is away from our shores, the safer, the cleaner and more sound our beaches and economy will be.”

That makes it sound as if Castor is taking a strong stand against the opposition to offshore drilling. The details are a bit more nuanced, however. Castor isn’t calling for a moratorium on new offshore drilling. She’s just asking President Obama to keep offshore oil rigs out of her own constituents’ back yard – 235 from Florida’s shores. “The Administration must completely rethink the latest proposal to bring oil rigs closer to the coast of Florida and uphold the bipartisan Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006, which created a 235-mile buffer from our shores,” she writes.

Is that 235-mile buffer really good enough to protect Florida’s shores? The Deepwater Horizon disaster shows clearly that it’s not. The site of the Deepwater Horizon’s drilling site is more than 350 miles away from Kathy Castor’s district on the west side of Florida’s peninsula, yet warnings now indicate that the oil slick from the catastrophe will likely reach not only Florida’s panhandle and western beaches, but take a ride on the Gulf Stream around to the beaches on the Atlantic shores of Florida as well.

Kathy Castor’s 235 mile compromise with Big Oil is insufficient. If she wants to protect her district from the extreme pollution that comes from offshore drilling, she’ll need to push for a new moratorium, not just the denial of a little distance.