After nearly 50 failed attempts over 40 years, the United States Senate, specifically one maverick Senator from Alaska whose vote the leadership badly needed for the new tax Act, adorned it with a particularly bad idea. It authorized oil-drilling leases on the Coastal Plain (which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has called the “biological heart”) of Alaska’s crown jewel, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As usual, the Senate overlooked its own and other federal agencies’ findings that oil extraction there would gravely compromise national security.
