As the price of gasoline goes down, the Republicans’ twisted logic for expanded offshore oil drilling becomes increasingly incoherent. At the very least, Nancy Pelosi should seek to delay a vote on offshore drilling. Time is on the side of the opponents of new drilling.

If I were a Republican in the House of Representatives right now, I would reconsider pushing the idea of offshore drilling. Expanding offshore drilling wouldn’t bring a drop of oil to the marketplace for years and years, and even then, the amount of oil would be so tiny that it could only bring gasoline prices down by a few pennies per gallon.

Barack Obama wants to attract Republican voters to his campaign, and so he is continuing his shift to the Right, away from the progressive voters who gained him the Democratic nomination. Obama is supporting offshore drilling not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the politically convenient thing to do at this particular moment.

If an oil company isn’t even using the leases of public lands they already have, why should they take on yet more leases… unless what those oil companies really want to do is just squat on their leases of public lands with oil under them only in order to prevent the oil from being drilled, thus decreasing supply and artificially driving up the cost of petroleum products so that they can make a bigger profit without doing any more work.

How is it that Virginia Foxx believes that the Democratic majority in Congress managed to cause the price of crude oil to rise years before it actually came into being?

It will do America little good to have a few more barrels of petroleum if our oceans are so fouled that we cannot find enough edible seafood along our coasts. John McCain either doesn’t understand that or he just doesn’t care.

Under Gohmert’s proposed law, if the people Missouri had a piece of wilderness where they didn’t want oil drilling, and Texas oil companies came and demanded oil drilling rights, the people of Missouri have to agree to the demands of Texas, or else forfeit the right to get any gasoline from outside its borders. Gohmert’s bill, H.R.4893, would have created a system of economic sanctions within the United States, from one state against another, and all for the benefit of big oil corporations in states like Texas.

Leonard Boswell has helped George W. Bush create a royal mess in Iraq, throwing away trillions of American dollars and thousands of American lives as if they were garbage. In 2002, Representative Boswell voted yes on rushing to war in Iraq.