Shea-Porter's energy plan makes little sense
To the editor:
Recently. New Hampshire Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter announced her "commonsense plan to reduce energy prices." I am embarrassed to have this level of thought coming from a representative of my district. Shea-Porter makes five suggestions to ease our pain at the pump:
1. Release oil from the strategic reserve: Unfortunately the 700 million gallons of oil Shea-Porter refers to is consumed by the world every five hours, according to the CIA. How can she possibly believe tapping this reserve would make any impact on world prices? All it would achieve is to make our military vulnerable to major interruptions in oil imports.
2. Responsible domestic drilling: "Responsible" for Shea-Porter means drilling not where geologists say there may be oil, but where boneheads in Congress believe oil companies should drill.
3. Limiting oil speculation: This may be my favorite. Like the legendary King Canute who ordered the tide not to come in, Shea-Porter believes we can order the financial markets to not speculate. Never mind the fact that there are financial markets all around the world. Never mind that regulating oil futures trading in one market will simply move the trading to another. Money will go where there is opportunity and it can leave a market in the blink of an eye.
4. Promoting conservation: Sorry, but prices promote conservation far better than windbags in Congress. Gasoline consumption in the United States is falling not because of the Democrats in Congress, but because of $4.25 gasoline. I suppose Congress can get some of the credit for the conservation, because they're partially to blame for the price of gasoline and home heating oil. Barriers to drilling and barriers to new refineries are how Congress drives up prices and promotes conservation. Thanks Congress, thanks a lot.
5. Alternative energy: Amazingly, Shea-Porter addresses alternatives to oil power without ever using the word nuclear. It takes an awful lot of windmills to equal one nuclear power plant. I think we need to drop the political biases against nuclear power and look at all alternative power possibilities.
This nonsense plan by Shea-Porter demonstrates why we need new people and new ideas in Washington. In stark contrast to this foolishness, John Stephen has presented realistic solutions based upon free enterprise, the market economy and good old American ingenuity.
DOUG NEWELL
Derry, N.H.
Popular vote is a better way to elect presidents
To the editor:
National Popular Vote is a constitutional and practical way of electing a president in a more fair and equitable way — by who gets the most votes nationwide, rather than the current winner-take-all, state-by-state method.
Under the current system, only a handful of states, like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, elect the president. Because unlike the vast majority of states, these states are equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, it is a toss-up as to which party will win in November. Thus the presidency can literally hang on 500 votes in Florida. This is an invitation to all sorts of mischief as well as depressed voter turn-out in safe states like Massachusetts and two-thirds of the country where the election doesn't matter.
Contrary to the editor's assertion, the framers did not intend this system. Their vision was a deliberative body of elites, appointed by the state legislatures, capable of making the best decisions for the rest of the country. Yet they also decided to give states the power to innovate by giving them the complete authority to decide how presidential electors are chosen. And innovate we have. The current winner-take-all system is one such "innovation" whose time has come —and long since gone. Now the states are using the power given to them by the framers to establish a better system, one where every vote counts, and counts equally.
James Madison supported a popular election for president saying "The people at large" are "the fittest to choose the president."
Thomas Jefferson also would not have looked kindly on last week's editorial, but for different reasons. He said, "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. ... forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead."
Our experience is clear. It is time to end the Electoral College as we know it today.
PAM WILMOT
Executive director
Common Cause Massachusetts
