Starting off on the wrong foot, Republican and Democratic congressional conferees directed to come up with a comprehensive energy bill came to the end of their first week of conferring deeply divided over how to proceed in the second and third weeks.

The Republicans, who lead both the House and the Senate and consequently the conference committee, announced Thursday they would come up with a Republican draft that would be made public and then be opened to discussion and amendment.

Chairman Pete Domenici (R-NM), of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told reporters in an afternoon briefing that a single text would be compiled by Republican staff from both sides of the Congress, using H.R. 6, which passed the House, S. 14, which was voted out of the Senate committee, and the previous year’s Senate bill, which was substituted and voted out (again) on the Senate floor.

For ranking minority member Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), “this is a deeply flawed strategy,” he said, noting that minority members would be denied initial input into the conference document. Attempting to push through amendments after the fact “is no substitute for actually being involved when key decisions are first made; no amount of labeling of the resulting text as draft or provisional can mask this fact.”

The Republican draft will be made public incrementally over the next two weeks, Domenici and staff aide Alex Flint told reporters, with less controversial provisions being released first starting Monday, Sept. 15. Meetings will then be held to consider proposed changes. Domenici defended the process, saying he is reversing the procedure of last year’s conference committee, which failed to produce a bill. While that conference committee had broad participation early on, those allowed into the negotiations became increasingly restricted as the process continued.

In this case the opening rounds will be exclusive, and succeeding debate will be inclusive. Domenici said that purely for organizational purposes the three bills should be reduced to one or the situation could become chaotic.

And for those of you in RTO [regional transmission organization] land, Domenici said he was standing by his commitment to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), (and the South and Far West) and including restrictions against FERC implementing its standard market design (SMD) until Dec. 31, 2006. Nor will the bill say whether Congress believes FERC has the authority to mandate RTO participation or not. That will be left to the courts.

He also pointed out that on the Republican side, there is not even agreement on electricity measures, with DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham’s letter to the committee a day earlier differing from FERC Chairman Pat Wood’s stance on power (see Daily GPI, Sept. 11).

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