Senate Democrats are expected to push for a vote this week on the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act of 2011, a bill to cut tax subsidies for Exxon Mobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Shell and Chevron.

The money saved by closing these loopholes — estimated at $21 billion over 10 years — would be used to pay down the deficit.

“At a time when families are feeling the pain at the pump and our deficit keeps growing at an alarming rate, we simply can’t afford to keep giving away billions in taxpayer handouts to oil companies that are doing nothing to help lower prices,” said bill sponsor Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) “The ‘Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act’ is based on a simple premise: we need everyone to do their share to lower the deficit, not just working families and the elderly.”

The bill would eliminate five special oil company exemptions.

In a Senate committee hearing last week, the leaders of Exxon Mobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Shell and Chevron called the proposal anti-completive and discriminatory and warned that it would threaten American jobs and harm innovation.

But with gas prices over $4 per gallon in much of the country, many Americans are most concerned with high fuel costs.

A report prepared for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) by the Congressional Research Service says that eliminating tax breaks for large oil companies is unlikely to have much affect on gasoline prices, because crude oil is the largest factor in the price of gas, and the price of crude oil is set by world market.

The tax changes are unlikely to affect oil output, the price of oil and, consequently, the price of gas, CRS found in an analysis of five breaks targeted by Democrats.

The Domestic Manufacturing Deduction

Oil companies get a 6 percent deduction in net income for domestic production.

Ending this would be equivalent to an increase on the tax on corporate profit, CRS said.

It is widely accepted that a proportional change in taxes on profit affects neither the firm’s incremental costs or revenues, and therefore does not change its behavior with respect to output. Since output does not change, there is little reason to believe that the price of oil, or gasoline, consumers face will increase.

The price of oil is high enough to provide incentive for continued production in the U.S, CRS said.

With current oil prices at, or near, $100 per barrel in the United States, it is unlikely that firms will slow production, or close wells as the result of the loss of the Section 199 deduction.

Intangible Drilling Costs

For nearly a century, oil and gas companies have been allowed to take immediate deductions for costs associated with exploring for oil. This was designed to enhance investment returns for financing risky exploration activities. But with oil prices high, companies don’t need incentives to explore. CRS:

Repeal of the immediate expensing of intangible drilling costs provision and replacement with a form of cost amortization more consistent with depreciation methods common in other industries likely will have no effect on current U.S. oil production, and hence no effect on current gasoline prices.

Dual Capacity Rules

Since the 1950s oil companies have been allowed to deduct the tax payments they make to other countries.

These tax payments are broadly defined, and, according to the Center for American Progress, companies have been allowed to claim credits for payments in countries that have little or no business tax.

CRS said that since elimination of this break amounts to a tax on profit it should have no effect on output or pricing decisions, and therefore no effect on the price of gasoline.

“The incidence of the tax would appear to be on shareholders.”

Oil companies are allowed to deduct a flat percentage of revenues from a well. This break is called “percentage depletion.” CRS says that it has been eliminated for most companies and should not be a factor in investment and pricing decisions by the five major oil companies.

The companies are also allowed to deduct the cost of tertiary injectants used in drilling. CRS found that the cost of ending this tax break would be very small for industry.

“[T]he five major oil companies, to which repeal would apply, earned over $32 billion in net income in the first quarter of 2011. Repeal of the [tertiary injectant] deduction for the industry is estimated by the Obama administration to yield only $6 million in revenue in 2012.”

The tax revenue generated by ending these five exemptions is expected to be 5 percent of the earnings of the largest oil companies, the report found.

“The first thing that has to be done is secure the border,” Miller said Sunday. “East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.”

Looking past the fact East Germany had more trouble keeping its residents in than keeping immigrants out, how much would it cost to implement East Germany-style border security?

First, it would require building a fence along the country’s borders, which could cost as much as $49 billion over a 25-year lifespan of the fence, according to a non-partisan Congressional Research Service report. That cost accounts for up to $70 million per mile for construction and upkeep of the fence, which would likely be damaged by would-be border crossers. Plus, there would be the cost of acquiring private land along the borders, hiring private contractors for construction and increased staffing of Border Patrol and customs agents along the borders.

Murkowski, who is challenging Miller with a write-in campaign, also supports a border fence. She voted the approve the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which allowed for a fence to be constructed along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border — still a far cry from creating a fence along the entire 1,950-mile border.

Davis is the former chief military prosecutor for the Bush administration’s military commissions who resigned in October 2007 rather than use evidence acquired through torture in commission cases. For months afterward, he publicly criticized the commissions — in articles, speeches and testimony to Congress, becoming something of a hero to civil rights advocates and others who believed the commissions were fundamentally flawed.

In December 2008 he went to work for the Congressional Research Service. But when he spoke out in November of this year against the continued use of the commissions in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal and a letter to The Washington Post, Davis was promptly fired. His writing violated CRS policy, he was told, and interfered with the agency’s duty to remain nonpartisan. Davis had expressed the criticisms as his own, however, rather than on behalf of the agency. The American Civil Liberties Union has threatened to sue on Morris’s behalf.

So when does a government agency’s requirement that its employees not speak publicly on political issues violate the First Amendment?

The government does have the right to restrict what its employees say when they’re speaking in their official capacity, as part of their job. But when they’re speaking as private citizens, public employees have more room to maneuver, particularly when they’re speaking about things unrelated to their jobs duties.

CRS, however, prides itself on both objectivity and secrecy, and apparently claimed that Morris’s public statements compromised both. Still, those values may well run up against the right to free speech in this conflict.

“The Congressional Research Service has indicated that, indeed, the bills that are before Congress would include illegal aliens, and I think this is wrong,” he told reporters Thursday.

Trouble is, that’s not what the report says at all.

In fact, CRS indicates that eligibility for the low-income subsidies House Democrats have proposed is limited to those “lawfully present in a state in the United States.” Section 246 of the proposal “would bar unauthorized aliens from receiving any premium or cost-sharing credit,” according to CRS.

Additionally, although the proposal would expand Medicaid eligibility, illegals, who don’t qualify for the program now, still wouldn’t. “This extension of benefits,” CRS notes, “could mean an increase in the number of noncitizens who already meet the immigration status requirements for Medicaid eligibility” — a group that doesn’t include those in the country illegally.

That takes care of the idea that unauthorized aliens would benefit from the taxpayer-subsidy sections of the bill.

What Democrats did do was to subject resident aliens to the individual mandate provision, which requires that most U.S. residents have health coverage. By the IRS’ definition, according to CRS, resident aliens include (1) those with green cards (ie, those in the country legally) and (2) those living in the United States for “at least 31 days during the current year and at least 183 days during the current year and previous two years,” including illegal aliens who fit that description.

So the bill would require some unauthorized aliens to buy their own insurance, but wouldn’t grant them subsidies to do so. It takes an imaginative mind to conclude that folks buying insurance coverage from private companies with U.S. dollars would somehow be a detriment to the country’s well-being — fiscal or otherwise.

The House bill would also allow illegals to access the so-called “exchange” Democrats have proposed to create — a menu of insurance options empowering consumers to compare the cost and coverage benefits of different plans. In that way, illegals would benefit from the cost savings likely to come with the creation of that menu, but again, that savings would come from market forces, not taxpayer subsidies. (Non-resident aliens would be exempt from the individual mandate.)

There are those who contend that, by including illegals in their reform plans at all, Democrats are somehow doing the country a disservice. William Jacobson, associate professor at Cornell Law, has blogged recently that, under the House bill, “illegal aliens would have been full participants in the nationalized health care system.” Jacobson foresees a future when subsidies are extended to these folks.

Having forced illegal aliens to purchase insurance, it would have been inevitable that some financial assistance would be offered to those who could not afford to purchase even the public option.

Still, even Jacobson is forced to concede that, “in fairness there is nothing in the House Bill which says so.” Nor does CRS indicate that would be the case — despite what Joe Wilson claims.

Notwithstanding her much-decried “wise Latina woman” claim, it turns out Sotomayor is no liberal activist hell-bent on replacing the Constitution’s equal protection clause with a new section mandating affirmative action, as some of the Republican criticism would suggest.

Instead, CRS reports, via Secrecy News: “Perhaps the most consistent characteristic of Judge Sotomayor’s approach as an appellate judge has been an adherence to the doctrine of stare decisis, i.e., the upholding of past judicial precedents.”

According to the nonpartisan research service, Sotomayor’s other prominent characteristics include “a careful application of particular facts at issue in a case and a dislike for situations in which the court might be seen as oversteping its judicial role.”

Hardly a judge who plans “to use her seat on the Supreme Court to advance liberal policy preferences,” as former Attorney General Ed Meese, who’s helping direct her critics, has suggested.