J. Todd Foster Column: Boucher's Next Election Might Be Decided By Energy BIll

The most exciting congressional campaign I’ve ever covered was in 1994, when newcomer George Nethercutt defeated House Speaker Tom Foley, R-Wash., by 4,000 votes. It was the second time in history and the first since 1860 that a sitting speaker had lost.

It proved that no incumbent congressman is invulnerable. That includes U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who represents Southwest Virginia’s 9th District.
The odds against a Republican wresting away Boucher’s seat in Congress are long; the best challenge he has faced in the past 10 years was Kevin Triplett, who now works at Bristol Motor Speedway, and Boucher still won in a 2004 landslide.

With Boucher’s recent support of a cap-and-trade energy bill, the National Republican Congressional Committee has taken aim at the 9th District congressman – an early Barack Obama supporter who could be threatened in 2010 if the GOP runs a big name against him and if Obama has failed to turn around the economy in a meaningful way.

Could Virginia Delegate Terry Kilgore be just the ticket for the Republicans?

“I don’t think so,” Kilgore, R-Scott County, said Friday by telephone. But he added: “Right now.”

The American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009, which passed the House 219-212 on June 26, pledges “to create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy.” Opponents say it will decimate the coal industry – a claim Boucher says is “disinformation” because coal usage will actually increase slightly.

“Anything carbon based is going to suffer,” Kilgore says, noting that the bill includes an unemployment provision as if anticipating job losses. “I think the effects are going to be pretty bad on the coal industry as a whole. As time goes on, we’re going to see a lot of coal jobs lost.”

Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in 2007 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that require regulation, Congress had no choice but to act. Whether Congress went too far will be determined with time.

Boucher said in a face-to-face interview on Tuesday that the energy bill is one of two of the most important measures this Congress will face; health care reform is the other.

“This is a bill I had a major role in helping to shape and guide through the House,” said Boucher, 62, who has been elected and re-elected 13 times. “When people say this is a job loser, that’s just wrong. It really is a job creator. It accelerates the movement toward electrification of transportation. All-electric cars and trucks don’t run on imported oil; they run on American electricity, which is coal generated.”

The utility industry has held back capital investment until it could see where Congress was headed with cap-and-trade legislation, Boucher says.
“They have known for years there would be legislation on carbon dioxide emissions,” he said. “That unleashes a tremendous amount of pent-up investment. That creates jobs. That helps with economic stimulation. American industries are going to want to invest in technology. It will be emerging from American labs and exported around the world. This creates the next technology boom.”

The cost to each American family will be $80 to $110 a year, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates – or less than the cost of a postage stamp per day, per family, Boucher says.

“The other side will try to make an issue of this because they see some potential for doing that,” Boucher says. “They’re not going to be able to do that perpetuating disinformation. There is not any new tax associated with this measure. Not a dollar of new tax. It’s a regulatory bill.”

Meanwhile, Boucher would not discuss the 2010 election and vowed that his only campaigning in 2009 would be to help Democrat Creigh Deeds get elected governor of Virginia.

Of the talk of a Kilgore run against him, Boucher said: “Terry and I are very good friends. We work collaboratively on many projects. … I think Terry is a very capable member of the House of Delegates. He and I are personal friends, partners in a whole range of ventures. What the future holds it holds. I’m not going to comment on the congressional race at this time. I have a job to do.”

Kilgore, meanwhile, has worked his way up in seniority after first being elected to the House of Delegates in 1994. “It would be tough to walk away from that,” he said.

Given Boucher’s dominance of the 9th District since Reagan’s first term, it probably will take a perfect storm to unseat him: a candidate of Kilgore’s caliber and an economy still limping along nearly 18 months from now.

And in Southwest Virginia, the 2010 race could be decided over the loss, if any, of coal jobs.

Mike Quillen, chief executive officer of Abingdon-based Alpha Natural Resources, credits Boucher with moderating the energy bill but says its full effects won’t be known for some time.

“We’re studying the heck out of it,” Quillen said Friday of the 1,300-page legislation. “We’re very closely working with Congressman Boucher’s office and do appreciate his efforts, to date, certainly on moving the language that is more comforting to us in terms of where it started.”

Quillen notes, however, that some estimates have utility rates climbing $3,000 a year, per family, and that two-thirds of all coal-mining jobs could go away.
“We’re trying to stay in the middle of the road and be open-minded about this,” he says.

J. TODD FOSTER is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or by phone at (276) 645-2513.