The Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011 (pdf) seeks to block the ban proposed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar within a 1-million-acre buffer zone around the nation’s most iconic national park. Conservation groups say the move is needed to protect the Colorado River watershed and to prevent industrialization of an area heavily reliant on outdoor recreation and tourism.

“We are disappointed in this jobs-killing legislation,” said Roger Clark, air and energy program director at Grand Canyon Trust. “Uranium mining threatens thousands of tourism-related jobs in northern Arizona. Salazar has found the right balance between protecting Grand Canyon and the $700 million tourism industry while leaving promising mining areas further from the national park open to exploration and mining.”

McCain countered that Salazar’s move would be a job-killer.

“The Department’s proposed mining withdrawal would kill hundreds of potential jobs to ‘save’ the Grand Canyon from the same form of uranium mining that conservation groups once supported,” McCain said. “It also threatens to unravel the spirit of the Arizona Wilderness Act and will raise significant questions for future Wilderness bills if agreements to accommodate responsible land uses are neither genuine nor enduring.”

House sponsors of the bill include Arizona Republicans Jeff Flake and Trent Franks.

“It is unconscionable that Senator McCain and Representatives Flake and Franks are seeking to undermine protections for Grand Canyon and its watershed and showing so little regard for the people of Arizona, including all of those who expressed strong support for protecting these lands from uranium mining and the pollution it produces,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter.

The Grand Canyon has been under growing pressure from surrounding mining and power-generating activities, including haze from coal-fired power plants.

Colorado is increasingly in the crosshairs of uranium mining and milling controversy, including a legacy of contamination from the state’s uranium heyday in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

“I don’t think so,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told the National Journal in response to whether she would comply with the resolution. She argued the moratorium was simply “about messaging” and would give a false impression about taking serious action on reducing the deficit. Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) expressed similar reservations yesterday.

And Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), for her part, attempted to backpedal on her definition of exactly what an earmark is, telling the Minneapolis Star Tribune that transportation projects should be excluded. “I don’t believe that building roads and bridges and interchanges should be considered an earmark,” Bachmann said. “There’s a big difference between funding a tea pot museum and a bridge over a vital waterway.”

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Mark Udall (Colo.) have teamed up with Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) to press for a vote on the Senate floor on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), however, remains a staunch proponent of earmarking and he has said he’ll block any efforts to have a floor vote on the issue should it be brought up today. He argued the Senate simply doesn’t have enough time to consider the measure right now, but would be open to a vote at another time.

Although the Republican Conference voted to adopt the moratorium, it’s important to remember that — currently, at least — it’s a nonbinding resolution.

“I’m going to look out for my state of Oklahoma,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told Poltico today, in apparent defiance of the upcoming decision. “Obviously, that’s what the Constitution says I’m going to do, and I’m going to do it. Let’s keep in mind this is over. I’ll be the last conservative standing.”

Whether Inhofe’s small act of civil disobedience — or Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C) hedging — prevents Republicans from claiming the moral high ground on the issue remains to be seen.

That’s not yet a majority, but it’s about double the number who have come out against the measure, so nearly all the senators now sitting on the fence would have to vote ‘no’ for DeMint’s moratorium to fail. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) emailed me the following statement on Friday:

The message from the 2010 election was unmistakable: Washington spends too much and borrows too much.  I want to take every possible step to reduce spending, decrease the debt and limit the size of the federal government.   Since joining the Senate in 2007, I have voted consistently for earmark reform.  Banning earmarks will not on its own put our fiscal house in order.  It will however send a strong message that we need to do something different and I plan to continue to vote for it.

And the momentum isn’t coming just from Republicans. Following President Obama’s call for Congress to reform the earmark process, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) released the following statement:

“Earmark reform has been a lonely fight for a long time, so it’s encouraging to have others taking this issue seriously, especially among Democrats since I will be the only senator from my party opposing earmarks after the new year,” McCaskill said.  “The bottom line is that tax dollars shouldn’t be doled out based on politics or secret deals, and it’s time both Democrats and Republicans join together to stop them.”

Earmark reform, and perhaps other open government and congressional ethics rules, might be a rare place of ideological overlap between President Obama and the Tea Party agenda. Teaming up on something like more aggressive lobbying reform or shoring up the Office of Congressional Ethics — which some Republicans have indicated they would like to see scrapped — would require a real setting aside of partisanship, however, and I haven’t seen anything so far to indicate that it’s in the works.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is pressing his Republican colleagues to put a moratorium on earmarks. (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

With a fight brewing between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Tea Party ringleader Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) over the practice of requesting earmarks in the Senate, most Republican Senators have been desperately hoping to avoid picking sides. But Tea Party groups, which are eagerly monitoring a closed-door Republican Party vote on the issue next Tuesday, have decided to make sitting on the sidelines that much more difficult.

[GOP1] “It might not ever be known, but if somebody won’t come out and say they’ll vote against earmarks, then we’ll be pretty sure we know they voted for allowing them,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, a national network of Tea Party groups. “And if that’s what they’re going to do, then a lot will see themselves facing primary challenges.”

The added pressure leaves many Republican senators between a rock and a hard place in the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote. On the one hand, they don’t want to undermine McConnell’s leadership or appear hypocritical should they continue the routine practice of requesting earmarks in the next Senate session. But they risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the GOP’s anti-spending campaign and alienating Tea Party groups that have made earmarks an important symbol of all that’s wrong with Washington.

Between now and Tuesday, Republican senators must weigh the dangers of speaking out versus straying mum and then cast a decisive, albeit non-binding vote that activists are looking to as a first sign of the character of next year’s Senate Republican caucus.

Following last week’s elections, DeMint wasted no time in capitalizing on the anti-spending fervor in Washington — and the anti-earmarks platforms on which many Senate Republicans had run — to announce a new push for a vote to place a year-long moratorium on the practice of earmarking at the upcoming Republican Conference meeting among Republicans. The issue quickly drove a wedge between the Tea Party and McConnell, who pushed back against DeMint’s proposal on television and in private. Tea Party leaders like Meckler couldn’t believe it.

“I think McConnell’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with the GOP and has been wrong for a long time,” said Meckler. “Following the election, he has a chance to be a hero and he’s being a zero. It’s very clear that the vast majority of Americans are anti-earmark. He’s a classic example of the arrogance of the ruling class.”

DeMint released a letter indicating that he had gathered the signatures of ten fellow Republican senators, including six fresh faces — Marco Rubio (Fla.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Mike Lee (Utah), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) — many of whom had run on explicitly anti-earmark platforms.

But many Republican senators hoped to avoid declaring either way, buoyed by the prospect that Tuesday’s vote would remain anonymous. The last time Senate Republicans had voted on a moratorium to end earmarks was in March, when DeMint led an open vote of the full Senate, and while a majority of Republicans had voted for the measure then, they had the benefit of knowing that with most Democrats voting against it, it had little chance of passing.

“It got a majority of the Republican conference last time, but like Bob Dole once said, you never get in trouble for voting for something that fails or against something that passes,” said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that advocates for reforming the congressional earmark process.

The secret ballot in Tuesday’s vote appeared to make approval of DeMint’s resolution that much less likely. “If you have a closed-door vote, then certainly there are people who can talk one way and vote another or won’t worry about the pressure back home or whatever else,” Ellis said.

The news that Tea Party groups will consider silence on the issue an admission of guilt, however, has thrown GOP senators’ previous calculations into flux and brought increased pressure on them to reveal their intentions. DeMint’s office confirmed on Wednesday that two more senators — Richard Burr (R-N.C) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — have signed on as cosponsors to his proposal and Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) office responded via email on Wednesday night to say that he, too, had signed the letter. Tea Party groups across the country, meanwhile, have rallied to DeMint’s cause.

“We support it because we would like for our elected officials to vote on the bills at hand and not attach other things to it that might cause them to vote for bad legislation,” said Phillip Dennis, who sits on the steering committee for the Dallas Tea Party. “Let them vote on each bill on its own merits.”

As for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), who voted against DeMint’s proposed moratorium in March and has yet to signal a position on the upcoming vote, Dennis added that his group will be “very interested in what she’s doing.”

Indeed, Hutchison is considered among the most vulnerable of GOP incumbents who are being scrutinized and asked to take a stand. She, Richard Lugar (Ind.), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Roger Wicker (Miss.) all voted against DeMint’s earmark moratorium in March, and all are facing re-election in 2012. All four offices have refused to reveal their positions this time around, but by doing so they risk incurring renewed calls by the Tea Party to run primary challenges against them in two years’ time.

“We’ll do what we always do,” said Meckler. “Our members will put immense pressure on every senator to vote against earmarks. This is a fundamental issue — it’s both substantive and symbolic. Will they vote against the politics of the past or are they still stuck in it? This is a vote that will never go away, like TARP. Tea Partiers have long memories. Politicians have always taken advantage of the fact that voters have short memories, but we’ll know, we’ll remember, and in 2012 when they have aggressive, well-funded primary challengers, they’ll know why.”

One Republican Senate office, which asked to remain anonymous, urged Tea Party groups not to make assumptions about the senator’s lack of public commitment at this time. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is also up for re-election in 2012, will wait until talking with his colleagues next week before coming to a decision. The office of Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), who has also thus far declined to indicate how he will vote, did not return requests for comment.

Staying silent, however, no longer seems like the safest option.

The connection between Mr. Lew’s appointment to the OMB and the Obama Administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium is tenuous, at best, but Sen. Landrieu makes a stab at drawing one in her letter to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.):

Although Mr. Lew clearly possesses the expertise necessary to serve as one of the President’s most important economic advisors, I found that he lacked sufficient concern for the host of economic challenges confronting the Gulf Coast. The fact that the most acute of these economic challenges, the moratorium, results from a direct (and reversible) federal action only serves to harden my stance on Mr. Lew’s nomination.  I cannot support further action on Mr. Lew’s nomination to be a key economic advisor to the President until I am convinced that the President and his Administration understand the detrimental impacts that the actual and de facto moratoria continue to have on the Gulf Coast.

Obama is likely to lift the drilling ban in October, ahead of its scheduled Nov. 30 expiration, said Michael McKenna, president of MWR Strategies, an oil industry consulting firm in Washington. Heightened scrutiny of drilling’s risks may delay the resumption of operations by companies such as BP Plc and Apache Corp. until mid-2011, McKenna said. [...]

“Lifting the moratorium is almost unimportant,” McKenna said in an interview. “It’s how different the regulatory regime is going to be after. The end game here is to make it a very, very difficult and time-consuming regulatory process.

The oil industry has long argued that new industry oversight would delay future drilling, and the Bloomberg story is certain to get their attention.

And now, shallow water drillers are arguing that the moratorium will affect their industry, too. A statement from the Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition — a group of companies that “provide shallow-water offshore contract drilling and related services,” according to its web site — says the moratorium will delay all drilling operations, threatening jobs in shallow water drilling.

Randy Stilley, president and CEO of coalition member Seahawk Drilling, says:

Over 40,000 workers are directly employed in jobs related to shallow-water drilling, an industry that the Secretary of the Interior has repeatedly acknowledged is less risky than deep water drilling. And although Administration officials stand by their claim that there is no official moratorium on shallow water operations, the Interior Department’s continuing delay in processing and approving shallow water permits has industry officials, politicians, and academics scratching their heads.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar penned an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle in which he said the administration has “launched the most aggressive, advanced and swift offshore drilling reforms ever implemented.”

According to the op-ed:

[I]n the deep-water areas, where the Deepwater Horizon blowout occurred, it is necessary and appropriate to require operators to demonstrate improved safety, blowout containment and spill response practices before allowing drilling to continue.

To be sure, both the deep-water drilling moratorium and the reforms we are implementing have drawn fire from the same powerful interests who have, over the last two decades, systematically fought regulation and oversight of offshore drilling operations.

But make no mistake: Our country needs these reforms and we will deliver them. We will raise the bar for deep-water drilling. We will hold the industry accountable. And we will build the strongest and safest offshore energy development program in the world. Salazar is secretary of the Interior.

Thad Allen, the national incident commander in the Gulf, also wrote an op-ed today. Allen, in The Washington Post, pats the administration on the back for what he calls “an unprecedented response” to the spill.

No one is claiming victory or “mission accomplished” at this point, nor should we. We should, however, recognize what has been done.

Democrats and Republicans have been sparring over the amendment all day. Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) sent around a document earlier today arguing that the amendment does not end the drilling moratorium because it leaves the final decision on bypassing the drilling ban up to the Interior Department. Hastings also said that the amendment was changed from another version that was introduced earlier in the week and includes “dangerous new language explicating granting authority to the Interior Secretary to impose further moratoria.”

When TWI posted a blog on the criticism this morning, Democrats responded within an hour. In an e-mail, Kevin Franck, press secretary for the Louisiana Democratic Party, said that much of the language in Melancon’s amendment is similar to an amendment offered by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) on the drilling moratorium. He also said that the amendment does not expand the Interior Department’s authority, it simply includes a “savings clause” that is common in legislation. Franck sent his own “fact” sheet to TWI, which explains the clause this way:

The “savings clause” in the Melancon amendment does not expand any powers of the federal government.  Savings clauses are common in legislation.  They exist to clarify that legislation being proposed does not affect existing authority. The Melancon amendment ends the current moratorium on offshore drilling while reiterating that the amendment does nothing to interfere with the long-standing authority of the Interior Department to take action to shut down a rig if it represents an immediate threat to human life.

The drilling moratorium is almost certainly going to be an issue in the midterm elections in the Gulf. The flap over this amendment underscores just how big of an issue the moratorium will be.

Asked about the criticism, Melancon spokesperson Robin Winchell said, “The Secretary of the Interior has always had the final say on drilling permit applications for public lands and oceans. The Melancon amendment does not change that.” She added, “The amendment was submitted to Rules Committee the afternoon before the vote, at about 3pm. It was not changed after that.”

Here’s one more thing to keep in mind: Given recent comments by administration officials that the drilling moratorium could be cut short, the amendment might not even have an opportunity to go into effect.