From the Minneapolis Star Tribune
While Senate Republicans were evangelizing for up-or-down votes on judicial nominees, House Republicans were bending the rules to send a tax-saving challenge to timber subsidies into point-of-order oblivion. Once again, control of Congress and the White House wasn't sufficient to protect this party's agenda from open decisionmaking.
The subsidies involve Alaska's Tongass National Forest -- the nation's last large, intact temperate rainforest, stretching over 17 million acres of islands and coastline in southeast Alaska. The Tongass has long been a favorite of environmentalists and sportsmen's groups, who have relentlessly opposed the Bush administration's efforts to roll back Clinton-era restrictions on new logging roads.
More recently, it has become a darling of conservative, taxpayer-oriented watchdog groups, who are fine with logging federal lands as long as the taxpayers get a reasonable return on their investment. But it has been a long time since that happened in the Tongass.
Last year, the U.S. Forest Service spent $49 million on logging-related programs in the Tongass, and collected $800,000 from timber companies. Taxpayers for Common Sense calculates that the loss amounts to $163,000 for each of 293 logging jobs.
To be fair, the forest's supervisor says only $25 million went directly to support timber harvesting; the rest was for administrative expenses and other construction. That would bring the per-job subsidy down to something over $80,000, nearly twice the typical logger's annual income of $46,000. So the Forest Service could better serve the regional economy by spreading its $25 million over twice as many loggers, then sending them home -- leaving the Tongass' old-growth stands as a magnet for southeast Alaska's burgeoning ecotourism sector.
Some readers with business sense will recognize that Forest Service investments may be repaid in future years. Exactly that point has been made by the federal timber czar, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey. This does not explain, however, the federal figures showing cumulative losses in the Tongass of $850 million since 1982.
Further, half the timber offered for sale in the Tongass since 1998 has failed to find a bidder, reflecting market realities: Cheaper imports have made it uneconomic to cut a lot of the wood available in the Tongass, even along the existing road network that the Forest Service is expanding. After one recent timber sale -- on which the government spent $2 million and collected $55,000 -- a logging company left behind 400,000 board feet of old-growth timber it had felled, enough to build two dozen homes, because it would have lost money hauling it out.
The absurdity -- make that obscenity -- of such scenarios explains why a provision banning federal spending on new roads in the Tongass was approved by the House last year on a vote of 222-205, with 48 Republicans joining in the majority. The ban died in the Senate, however, thanks to Alaska Republican Ted Stevens.
But this year Stevens has been rotated out of his spot as appropriations chairman, and so the Tongass ban prepared by Reps. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, and Robert Andrews, D-N.J., seemed likely to succeed at last. Right up until Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., got the House parliamentarian to rule that their proposal, offered as an amendment to the Interior appropriations bill, was out of order because it attempted to make new law within a spending measure.
Sometimes that's against the House rules. Sometimes it's not, as when Pombo defeated, on the very same day, an identical challenge to his amendment banning federal spending on enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.
It would be ever so much easier to respect the Republicans' reverence for majority rule and proper procedure if they also applied these principles to themselves.
