As Carter Wood noted below, the Senate had a lopsided procedural vote yesterday that allows the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act to move forward. But it ain’t done yet and there will be more votes until we get to final passage. We’ll keep you posted, but please click here to tell your Senators to continue to vote to keep this bill moving toward eventual passage.

The White House weighed in yesterday with its official “Statement of Administration Policy,” noting their support for passage of S. 3711.

Al Gore loves to talk about “the tipping point” in his global warming campaign, a point of no return of sorts. Unfortunately for organized labor, they are facing a tipping point of their own.

In 1983, fewer than a third of union workers were government employees. Today, just under half are public sector employees, paid by your tax dollars. Overall, the number of union workers in government has increased from less than 6 million in 1983 to nearly 8 million, while the number of private sector union members has fallen from more than 12 million to just under 9 million in the same period. In other words, public employees are a growing numerator over a shrinking denominator.

What does this mean for labor? It means that they are fast approaching a point where the majority of all union members in this country are public sector employees. Their goals are to increase the size, scope and cost of government. This increasingly will put a greater tax burden on the (shrinking) half of the membership who works in the private sector. This graph shows it quite clearly. For labor, it portends intense internal battles ahead as they try to set priorities for diverse groups with very different objectives.

For those of you who are graph-averse, here’s a slightly less scholarly depiction of what lies ahead for labor.

A major procedural hurdle was overcome today when the Senate voted 86-12 to proceed to debate on S. 3711, the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. (Roll Call vote here.) There had been some speculation about filibusters and other odd procedural tactics, and schedules can change, but it looks now like debate will continue through Friday with the vote on final passage on Monday.

As NAM President John Engler says in our news release, we’re encouraged by today’s strong, bipartisan vote and will continue to push for passage of S. 3711, which will unlock domestic energy supplies and make America a more affordable place to live and work.

Here’s a link to a great editorial in today’s Examiner entitled, “It’s not 1969 on energy anymore,” making the case for opening up our own resources to exploration.

Says The Examiner:

“U.S. consumers and businesses have to deal with energy costs kept artificially high for reasons that long ago ceased to be valid. It’s time to bring the law up to date by supporting S. 3711, ‘the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act’ introduced by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.”

Click here to read the full editorial.

Yesterday, yours truly participated on a panel at the National Press Club that discussed the effects of globalism on the U.S. economy. While panelist Fred Bergsten, Director of the Institute for International Economics, discussed the net benefits of globalization to the U.S. economy, Lou Uchitelle of the New York Times talked about globalism’s impact on the labor market and Jeffrey Sparshott of the Washinton Times discussed his recent series on how U.S. companies successfully compete in the world economy, I discussed globalization from the perspective of U.S. manufacturers. Click here to see my comments.

The first votes are expected in the Senate today on the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. We ran across this document yesterday put out by the Consumer Alliance for Energy Security, thought it was a pretty good overview of why this bill makes sense.

Here’s a copy of the Key Vote card we sent to every Senate office yesterday, letting them know they’d be graded on this vote. Please click here to weigh in. Hopefully this thing will get put to bed this week. So many of you have opted to weigh in through the blog that we’ll keep posting the link ’til the last dog dies. Please drop both your Senators a note today.

The President’s coming tomorrow. We don’t want to have to tell him you didn’t do it.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), longtime foe of tapping US resources off of the Florida coast (even though it’s way past the sight line and you can’t “spill” natural gas), now sees the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act inching slowly toward passage. He appeared at first to be on board with the bill, but has now tossed up a new roadblock, one that should mystify anyone who has taken a basics civics course.

Sen. Nelson’s latest gambit is his effort to seek assurances (not sure from whom) that the Senate bill — if it passes — will not be conferenced or compromised with the more expansive House bill — which they all get a chance to vote on again anyway. Even the lefty St. Petersburg (that’s Florida, not Russia) Times ran a story about it under the headline, “Nelson makes unusual request for bill.” We guess so.

So in the interest of Sen. Bill Nelson’s continuing education (we don’t want anyone to confuse him with Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, who actually understands the legislative process), we present a link to this site that describes how a bill becomes law. See, one chamber passes their bill, the other chamber passes their bill and then — see step “D” in the attached link — it goes to Conference to work out the differences. For 200+ years it has worked this way even though for 200+ years, every sponsor of every bill would like to have their bill become law just the way they wrote it. Would that it were so.

Welcome to the world of legislation, Sen. Nelson. Welcome to the world of compromise.

Click here if you want to drop him a note.

Thanks to our friends over at the Business and Media Center for passing this one along. Protectionist Lou Dobbs was interviewing Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who’s just written a book entitled, “Take This Job and Ship It,”, so you can kinda guess where that one’s going.

In any event, Lou, not wanting to look too much like the fix was in (he’s lost all semblance of balance, not sure why he’d care) felt obliged to say about Sen. Dorgan, “Senator Byron Dorgan is no protectionist. In point of fact, he is calling for expanded markets for U.S. exports…” It struck us as the trade equivalent of Junior Samples interviewing Reuben Studdard about his new diet book saying, “Reuben is not obese…”

Well, we went and checked Sen. Dorgan’s report card and in fact he has a NAM Vote Rating for this Congress of just 38%. He has opposed trade promotion authority, opposed Chile, Singapore & Australia, Oman and Central America Free Trade Agreements — even though they all opened markets for American manufacturers. Not sure how one would define “protectionist,” but the good Senator is certainly not voting like a free trader.

And Lou’s probably not a very good litmus on this one.

Not sure we’ve seen any better and clearer explanation of what drives the price of oil (our own included) than Bob Samuelson’s piece in today’s WaPo. Samuelson’s an economist — and a bright one at that — and has a knack for writing in plain English. We commend it. In the end, he concludes:

“Oil is essential and insecure. A sensible country would minimize this insecurity by economizing on oil’s use … and developing its own resources. (Emphasis ours.) We should have redoubled our efforts years ago; we should do so now.”

Hopefully the Senate is reading the WaPo today.

We managed a shout-out on the WaPo blog on Monday. Rachel Dry summarized our beef with Michael Grunwald’s global warming piece on Sunday.

Click here to see it for yourself. Glad our side of the story got some play.