Before the past year recedes further, it's time for this column's annual awards for dubious achievements and amusing moments in government: the 2011 Watchies. The climate was right for impressive contenders as a Republican-controlled US House squared off against congressional Democrats and the Obama administration. But a mere handful actually won.
The White House gets one for the year's biggest political miscalculation with the president's Nov. 11 announcement postponing his decision on the proposed Keystone XL crude oil pipeline project's cross-border permit until after the 2012 elections.
The move may have appeased the project's environmental critics. It also handed congressional Republicans a jobs creation issue leading into an election year, and antagonized one of the country's closest allies.
Moreover, Nebraska—where questions originally were raised over the pipeline's crossing land above the state's primary drinking water source—now seems solidly behind the project. That apparently includes one of its US senators, Democrat Ben Nelson, who originally expressed concerns before deciding not to run for reelection.
Nelson nevertheless receives an "Unbelievable Patience" Watchy for listening to a reporter ask if the president should be held responsible for not living up to his 2008 campaign promise to bring civility back to Washington before tartly responding, "His first name is Barack, not Merlin."
The US Environmental Protection Agency certainly was in the running this past year with several regulations, proposals, and inquiries. It earned a "You Asked for It" Watchy on Dec. 8 when its Denver regional office released a draft analysis from its Pavillion, Wyo., groundwater investigation for public comment and scientific peer review that was so seriously flawed that it immediately got plenty of both.
Enriching the language
Congressional hearings provided bizarrely entertaining moments, particularly at the Natural Resources Committee in the GOP-controlled House. That was where US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar introduced an apparently new expression, "ear-banging," when he described committee member Louis Gohmert's (R-Tex.) repeated interruptions as he tried to finish answering a question.
Relations between other Natural Resource Committee Republicans and US Department of Interior officials sometimes grew downright frosty in 2011. Rep. Jeff Landry (La.) and Michael R. Bromwich, who led the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, sometimes seemed likelier to step outside for blows than for beer.
Bromwich nevertheless won a "Startlingly Candid" Watchy at his farewell press conference in late November when he said what he knew about the oil and gas business before becoming BOEMRE director wouldn't have filled a thimble. He learned quickly, however, and left behind a dramatically changed federal offshore oil and gas regulatory regime after a relatively short time on the job.
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