IMHO this qualifies as The Good Idea of the Week.
The people who need to hear about this right now are our senators. Lugar's all for it, and he has lots of push. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a state where people are rumored to know something about oil and gas, is blocking it.
I'm afraid Texas's senators would be inclined to go along with anything Bush wants, just because he wants it -- and because his people totally control the Texas GOP.
Anent which, an obscure column in a recent number of the wretchedly liberal-turning Houston Chronicle (the editor is driving the paper to the left, and admitted it at a dinner in which he was quoted in his own paper) informs us that, after her strong rebuff by El Paso-area businessmen in her fund-raising campaign to test the waters concerning a run for the governorship of Texas against Bush protege' Rick Perry (whom Bush and Karl Rove are said to privately despise as "not the sharpest knife in the drawer"), U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison has suddenly turned up with a pair of important new Senate committee assignments overseeing NASA and other matters of interest to Texans.
IOW, there will be no Kay Bailey Hutchison challenge for the Texas governorship this year. Perry is to be protected, and all the Bushbots and bag-bearing businessmen are lined up to defend him. The El Paso millionaires basically and publicly told a very shocked Kay, they have too much money and time invested in Perry, and they want their money's worth!
So she's being paid off to go away, basically, after getting the rebuff. That's the way I read it.
She would be a very tough vote to get, in such an environment, against anything that Bush has put the word out that he wants. Hutchison's junior colleague is even more supine. I'd cite a recent example, but he isn't worth the memory expenditure.