A second chance to get an inside view of energy policy

It's been more than two years since the General Accounting Office accepted defeat in its efforts to gain insight into the workings of Vice President Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group.
The GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress had taken its case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, attempting to find out which companies, which executives and which special interest groups went behind closed doors in 2001 to help the vice president put together the Bush administration's energy policy.
After being rebuffed by the Supreme Court in August 2003, the GAO threw in the towel.
Against all odds
It's amazing that this administration was able to wrap a cloak of secrecy around its energy policy at the very time that energy was one of the hottest topics in the country -- remember the collapse of Enron, the thousands of people who lost their jobs, their pensions and their life savings, the multi-billion dollar manipulation of electricity prices in California that contributed to the recall of a governor? And, yes, it did come out that Enron executives were among Cheney's energy advisers.
Well, thanks to another energy crisis -- the $1 per gallon run up in gasoline prices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina -- the American people may yet get a bit of insight into the secret process of developing the nation's energy policy.
That is, if the Republican leadership, particularly in the U.S. Senate, starts to show as much concern for the people as for oil company executives.
Last week, oil executives were called before two Senate committees that showed some curiosity into the coincidence of oil companies that said they were coping with product shortages and record-high crude prices managing to make record profits. Exxon Mobil Corp. reported the largest quarterly corporate net profit ever, $9.9 billion, up 75 percent. Royal Dutch Shell reported profit growth of 68 percent; British Petroleum, 34 percent; Chevron Corp., 12 percent; and ConocoPhillips, 89 percent, to $3.8 billion.
Unsworn testimony
Unfortunately, Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, Commerce Committee chairman, rejected a request that the executives be sworn in before giving testimony -- as, for instance, baseball players were when testifying about steroid use in their sport.
And so, perhaps it should not be surprising that when the executives were asked if they or anyone from their companies had participated in the National Energy Policy Development Group, all either said no or said they didn't know.
The Washington Post subsequently learned that at least some of these executives either forgot or lied about their companies' involvement.
Democratic senators are calling for additional hearings and are asking that subsequent testimony by oil executives be taken under oath.
Even though prices at the pump have fallen in recent weeks, the pain felt by many motorists in September and October may be fresh enough that Sen. Stevens and others who have long been chummy with the oil industry will see that stonewalling wouldn't be a smart political move.
It's never too late to break the bonds of secrecy wrapped around the nation's energy policy. And with much of the nation about to be hit with record-high heating costs, the Senate should want to satisfy the voters' curiosity sooner rather than later.
Correction
An editorial in Sunday's paper incorrectly identified the hometown of U.S. Rep. John Murtha as Scranton, Pa. He is from Johnstown.