Dear Representative:

As Congress approaches the critical showdown over reducing the size of government, lowering the deficit, balancing the budget and setting us on the road to fiscal sanity, the last thing we need is legislation to spend billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing natural gas vehicles. Yet that is exactly what H.R. 1380, the “NAT GAS Act” would do.

While Americans are paying $4 per gallon to fill up their tank, HR 1380 would extend the 50 cents per gallon subsidy for liquid or compressed natural gas and hand out credits of up to $64,000 for purchasing natural gas vehicles.

In recent days, the House has passed a series of excellent bills that would end the Obama Administration’s war on domestic energy production, a war that has only increased America ‘s reliance on foreign sources of energy.  HR 1380 does nothing to help that effort.  It does nothing to reverse the drilling moratorium.  It does nothing to open up ANWR to oil exploration.  It does nothing to reverse the EPA’s attempt to impose draconian regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.  That’s why so many members of Congress who support the Obama Administration’s war on domestic energy production, such as Raul Grijalva, Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Jim McDermott are co-sponsors of this bill.  They like the idea of using government power to help decide what people should buy.  They like the idea of government picking winners and losers rather than allow a free market to decide the best choice of fuel.  But Republicans should know better.

Although the bill has not received an official score from CBO, the estimated cost is over $9 billion.  Supporters of the bill say they are “looking around for an offset,” but there is no offset in the bill as written and introduced.  It is highly unlikely that the many liberal Democrats supporting the bill would accept meaningful spending reductions as an offset, so the alternative is a tax increase of some type of budget gimmick.

On behalf of the American Conservative Union, I ask that you not co-sponsor this bill and, if you are already a co-sponsor, to ask that your name be removed from the bill.  Should  HR 1380 come to a vote, ACU will seriously consider that vote for its 2011 ratings.  HR 1380, the NAT GAS Act, is the type of special interest legislation the American people said they were fed up with in November.

Sincerely,

Gregg Keller

National Executive Director
American Conservative Union

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2011 at 10:39 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.