Editorial: Tell ‘em to take a hike

Saturday, May 27, 2006 | 7:40 a.m.

The House has taken two laudable steps to limit rewards doled out to industries that take natural resources from public lands and waters.

In the first step, a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers approved an amendment last week aimed at forcing oil and gas companies to renegotiate more than 1,000 contracts they struck with the government for drilling.

Because of government errors in drafting drilling leases during the Clinton administration, and because of Bush administration giveaways, the contracts allowed the companies to avoid paying standard royalties to the government - as much as $7 billion in the next five years, according to The New York Times.

The legislation is designed to pressure companies to rewrite the contracts by threatening them with the possible loss of future contracts.

The companies are miffed that the government would renege on a deal. But 85 Republicans joined most Democrats in supporting the measure, and we applaud them for it. The lawmakers are sensitive to the public's growing anger over energy company profits that are soaring along with prices at the pump, as they should be.

Also last week, Democrats, plus 68 Republicans, voted to stop spending federal money on road building in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, effectively killing the waning timber industry there. The government has lost an average of $40 million a year subsidizing the flagging industry that now employs just 300 loggers in Tongass. Environmentalists cheered the decision, which helps protect a wilderness sometimes called America's Rain Forest. But it was the cost savings that won the votes of GOP fiscal hawks, one of whom noted that the government was spending $150,000 a year in subsidies to save each one of the 300 logging jobs.

Both pieces of bipartisan legislation are good policy and fiscally responsible, and both face Senate scrutiny. Senators should embrace what the House has done and leave the measures intact.