Amy Worden reports that both Democrats on the conference committee for the fracking bill voted against it:
A joint House-Senate committee agreed Monday night on a bill to impose an “impact fee” on natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania, moving the long-debated fee a giant step closer to final passage.
The agreement – reached on the eve of Gov. Corbett’s annual budget message – signaled a rough accord had been reached between Republicans who control the state Senate and their GOP counterparts in the House.
The conference committee voted, 4-2, on party lines Monday night to accept a bill that calls for a per-well fee tied to the average price of natural gas extracted in the lucrative Marcellus Shale formation [...]
State Rep. Mike Hanna (D., Centre), who represented House Democrats on the conference committee, called the proposal a loophole-filled “industry giveaway” that would not adequately protect the environment or provide enough money to address road damage and other local effects of drilling.
The Senate votes this morning. We need all Senate Democrats to hang together on this. It is one of the most important votes of the election year. If Democrats draw a clean contrast on this bill, they can run on this giveaway in the 2012 election.
The Republicans are in a weaker position here than it may seem. The Commonwealth Foundation and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform both came out against the bill. Even though it is not a severance tax, they are denouncing it as a tax in harsh terms. This is probably going to scare some freshmen Republicans away from voting for the bill, but they can’t afford to lose many of their members on this vote. It looks like the margin is going to be very slim.
We cannot have a repeat of the redistricting fiasco, where Democrats put the Republican map over the line. If the Republicans don’t have the votes in their own caucus to pass the impact fee, Democrats need to let it go down, and then run against it in November.
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