The new Congress with slim Republican majorities in each house has a better chance to pass a trimmed down energy bill or to sneak through an Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) drilling bill in the next two years, according to Slade Gorton, a former three-term Republican senator from the state of Washington.

While last year’s “gridlock on energy legislation was almost a certainty, rather than a surprise,” the changes in the Senate with the Republicans holding a majority smooth the path a little for the energy bill, Gorton told an energy conference in Seattle Thursday. He said the House, which is under the same energy committee leadership, will likely do what it did the past session. But in the Senate “there are profound differences.”

Nevertheless, there still are not enough votes (60) to overcome a filibuster over ANWR in the Senate, the former senator, now a Seattle-based attorney, told participants at a Law Seminars International conference on “Buying and Selling Electricity in the Pacific Northwest.” However, he thinks a budgetary legislative maneuver may get around the filibuster provisions.

“The lack of 60 votes doesn’t mean that ANWR may not happen,” Gorton said. “There is another peculiarity in Congress, and it involves one of the first bills that will come to Congress this year — a ‘budget reconciliation bill’ that is the vehicle by which the president will get a vote on his proposed tax cuts. It will set the total amount of money that Congress will spend this year.”

Gorton said that a budget bill and the so-called reconciliation bill are not subject to a filibuster in the Senate, noting they have limited time debate and all issues are settled by simple, direct majority votes.

“Any policy issue that has a significant monetary impact may be included in a reconciliation bill, and I think ANWR can be proposed as something that would help the federal treasury, so it could be included in a reconciliation bill and avoid a filibuster in the Senate,” Gorton said.

“Whether or not that will actually happen, I am not sure, but there is a very real possibility that it will, and you can be sure that the backers of ANWR will do all that they can to see that it takes place.”

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