BODY: RSEC: It's
not all that rare to see unrelated, controversial amendments tacked onto popular
legislation to improve their chances of passing. But as Sen. Majority Leader Tom
Daschle, D-S.D., noted this week, the pairing of drilling in the Alaskan
wilderness with a six-month ban on human cloning _ attached
to, of all things, a railroad retirement bill _ was one of the most unusual
combinations the Senate has seen in recent memory. Perhaps Americans who love
Alaska's pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), along with supporters
of research that could employ the cloning of cells, should take a moment to
thank Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont.
No, Jeffords did not engineer the
amendments' procedural-vote demise. You can probably thank Daschle himself for
seeing to that. But absent Jeffords' earlier change of party _ from Republican
to independent _ the GOP would still control the Senate. And the GOP, having
passed both bills in the House already, wanted those measures passed this
year.
Now the proposals
will wait to be examined in hearings and debate _ just as they ought to be.
Anything as important as oil drilling in a federal wilderness, let alone
something as complex as the ethics of biotechnology, should be subjected to
rigorous scrutiny.
The
passage of either issue would have multiple ramifications. The anticloning bill
would not only ban the genetic replication of humans; it would halt any research
using cloned cells _ so-called therapeutic research. For most people, these are
two very different ethical issues, and the differences must be explored.
Therapeutic cloning is
potentially an important aspect of stem-cell research, which holds tremendous
promise for the treatment of many debilitating diseases _ a promise that should
be weighed against concerns about a "slippery slope" that might lead to the
cloning of actual humans.
Similarly, neither the need for drilling
in ANWR nor its potential effects have been adequately examined. Republicans
have used the war against terrorism as a reason to approve it on the basis of
national security, but urgent as that sounds, no one has made a persuasive case
for it.
Indeed, the case has
been muddied by the recent muddled, if not dishonest, testimony of Interior
Secretary Gale Norton before a Senate committee. The Washington Post detailed
how Norton, upon being asked to testify, requested help from the agency in
charge of the refuge. It dutifully supplied her with scientific data, which she
used selectively to the Bush administration's advantage.
Norton testified, for example, that
caribou calving was concentrated outside the refuge area for 11 of the past 18
years. In fact, calving by the Porcupine Caribou Herd has been concentrated in
the drilling area for 27 of the last 30 years _ a fact the Fish and Wildlife
Service had given her. Norton also ignored Fish and Wildlife data showing that
in the years caribou calve elsewhere, "calf production and early survival of
calves are lower."
These
and other environmental effects of drilling _ including potential oil spills,
hazardous-waste dumping and the emission of air pollutants _ require scrutiny.
So should the GOP's assertion that national security requires drilling in the
refuge.
Next year will be
time enough for Republicans to make their case.
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