Republicans Offer $100 Rebate To Ease Pain of Soaring Gas

Senate Majority Leader Frist unveiled a Republican proposal to relieve high gasoline prices, calling for a $100 rebate to consumers and drilling for oil and natural gas in Alaska.

Rebates would be offered to taxpayers with incomes less than $125,000 a year, or $150,000 for couples, Dr. Frist said. The legislation directs checks be issued by August 30. The bill would also allow companies to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area Republicans have attempted to open for energy production for more than 20 years.

The legislative package "will give consumers relief at the pump and help to bring down the price of gas over the longer term," Dr. Frist, a Tennessee Republican, told reporters at a press conference today.

President Bush said April 25 he would suspend deliveries of oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and he called for repeal of oil industry subsidies. Crude oil prices touched $75.35 a barrel April 21 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and gasoline pump prices are above $3 a gallon in states including New York, Maryland, and California.

Congressional action on energy prices comes as Exxon Mobil Corporation, the world's biggest oil company, reported net income of $8.4 billion for the first three months of the year, a company record for the quarter.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation today that would bar oil and gas producers and refiners from withholding or diverting fuel from American markets to increase prices or create shortages.

The measure, sponsored by Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, would also allow lawsuits against the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for price fixing.

House Republican leaders will begin advancing a series of bills beginning next week designed to bolster domestic oil production, increase American refinery capacity and encourage more development of alternative fuel sources.

Dr. Frist's legislative proposal echoes the president's call to temporarily suspend deliveries to the oil stockpile and includes changing an accounting rule that might force large oil companies to pay billions of dollars in additional taxes.

"We would be ready to vote on it very quickly," said Dr. Frist. "I know the Democrats have proposed, and last night were working and are strongly supporting, a windfall tax proposal. For the most part we'd be very opposed to that, and if they'd like to vote on that we'd like to take this directly to the floor and vote on this as well."

One oil producer warned against raising taxes, saying it would crimp investment in new supplies.

"If taxes are increased, companies will be pushed to reduce their investment," the chief executive officer of Houston-based oil producer Apache Corporations, Steven Farris, said on a conference call with analysts and investors today. "Discouraging investments in the upstream sector may be politically popular, but it will only dig the hole deeper over the long term."

Opening the Alaska refuge to drilling was opposed by Senate Democrats.

"Americans are struggling to pay the rising cost of gas, and they are not interested in handouts to help oil companies make more money by letting them drill in wildlife refuges," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in a statement.

"It is a cynical, politically motivated scheme to bribe Americans for a special-interest agenda that has otherwise failed to pass muster in this Congress," the executive director of the environmental group Sierra Club, Carl Pope, said in a statement.