Anchorage Daily News

WASHINGTON -- Alaska's senators fell two votes shy of the 50 they needed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

"I'm mad enough to eat nails right now," Sen. Ted Stevens said Wednesday afternoon, after the Senate voted 52-48 not to include ANWR drilling revenues in its annual budget resolution. "I just don't like it when people don't keep their word to me."

He and Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the fight is not over for the year. But Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, sounded as though he'd had the wind knocked out of him.

Just before the vote, in the last few minutes allotted to him to make his case, he issued a warning.

"People who vote against this today are voting against me -- and I will not forget it," he said.

A gasp went up in the chamber as he issued what sounded like a political threat.

Seven Republicans voted with the Democrats to remove ANWR drilling from the budget resolution. Both the pro-drilling lobby and environmentalists had been targeting four senators thought to be on the fence: Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both D-Ark.; Gordon Smith, D-Ore.; and Norm Coleman, R-Minn. In the end, all four voted against drilling.

Afterward, Stevens said three senators -- he did not name them -- had reneged on commitments to him. He would keep that in mind when he was writing the annual spending bills, he said.

"You bet your bottom dollar," he said grimly. "If they can't keep their word to me, why should I keep my word to them? Why should I give my word?"

Throughout the debate, he has also fumed about a promise he says two Democratic senators -- Henry Jackson of Washington and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts -- made to him 23 years ago.

Stevens said he agreed in 1980 to a bill that protected 100 million acres of Alaska land from development -- the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act -- because those two Democratic leaders agreed to allow oil development on 1.5 million acres on the coastal plain of the Arctic refuge.

But the lands act only says the coastal plain would be studied for oil and gas development. It says a future Congress would have to pass another law to allow exploration or drilling.

Stevens said Sens. Jackson and Tsongas promised to get that second law passed. Years after the deaths of those men, Stevens is still working to get the area opened.

Wednesday's vote had him thinking he made a mistake when he agreed to ANILCA. He and Mike Gravel, the last Democrat Alaska sent to the U.S. Senate, were bitterly divided over the bill.

"It proves that he was right," Stevens said. "He said don't trust them, and I did."

The arguments on the Senate floor this week went much the same as they have before. Stevens and Murkowski talked about the importance of ANWR's oil to the nation's energy security and economy. They said newer drilling techniques require only a tiny, temporary footprint on the land. And they tried to counter the pictures Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and others held up depicting the coastal plain as a lush wilderness teeming with flowers.

Stevens offered to take senators up there in winter to see it for themselves.

"It's frozen," he boomed. "It's frozen tundra."

Then Sen. Lincoln Chafee, D-R.I., took the floor. He has been to the refuge. He hiked around it for hours at a time. When he showed his poster-sized pictures, he sounded more like an enthralled tourist than a senator debating a bill.

He talked about "gorgeous rolling grasslands" and said it was the most beautiful place he'd ever been.

Stevens, wearing the "Incredible Hulk" tie he dons for battle, paced the chamber, tapping his pointer on the carpet. He asked Chafee if he'd been to Prudhoe Bay to see the oil development.

Chafee had. Still sounding enchanted with his trip, he spoke of staying at the Deadhorse Hotel. The owner, he said, told him to be careful of a bear that had been prowling the area.

"It's just Toby, but you don't want to startle him," the hotelier said.

The room tittered at the mention of a place where roaming bears have names.

Later, Chafee read a small story in The New York Times saying Toby had to be killed. He was shot inside the hotel, where he'd gone to eat garbage.

"The point is, there should be places for the Tobys of the world," Chafee said before voting against ANWR drilling. "Nobody wanted to harm Toby, but it just came to that."

The Alaska senators said it is still possible ANWR may be part of a budget bill, depending on what the House does.

"It doesn't mean ... that this issue is dead. It is not," Murkowski said. "It absolutely is not."

Stevens said they might have to fight off Sen. Joseph Lieberman's bill to turn the coastal plain into a legally protected wilderness. Lieberman, D-Conn., is a candidate for president and ANWR could be quite a trophy for him to carry into the race, Stevens said.

"This is presidential politics now," Stevens said. "ANWR is just a football, a presidential football in 2004."

Reporter Liz Ruskin can be reached at lruskin@adn.com.