Senate panel deadlocks on Biden Interior nominee for second time

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Thursday deadlocked 10-10 on a long-delayed vote for a key Interior Department official, setting the stage for a Senate-wide vote on the nomination. 

Laura Daniel-Davis, President Biden’s nominee for assistant secretary of the Interior for land and minerals management, already faced the panel in November, when it deadlocked on her nomination along party lines. 

President Biden renominated her in January, and committee Chairman Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) sparked umbrage in March by scheduling a rare, but not unprecedented, second hearing for Daniel-Davis at the request of ranking member John Barrasso (R-Wyo.).

Barrasso has been a frequent critic of Daniel-Davis’s views on oil drilling and on Thursday accused her of “enthusiastically implement[ing] the Biden administration’s punishing energy policies.” The Wyoming Republican also took aim at the Interior Department’s recently released draft five-year oil and gas leasing plan, which included an option for no new leases. 

Although Manchin voted for Daniel-Davis’s nomination with the rest of the panel’s Democrats, he also expressed displeasure with the current conditions of federal leasing programs while conceding “this is not her fault, and I believe that Ms. Daniel-Davis is incredibly qualified.”  

In his own remarks, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), one of the senate’s most vocal critics of the Biden administration’s energy policies, countered, “Maybe it’s not Ms. Laura Daniel-Davis’s fault, but at some point you’ve got to register your complaint, and she becomes the point of complaint.” 

Daniel-Davis was originally set to receive a second vote from the panel earlier this year. However, in March Manchin announced a delay on the vote after the second hearing, citing energy concerns following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“As we continue to watch energy being used as a weapon of war by Vladimir Putin, the need for increased American energy production is clear to ensure domestic supplies and help our allies,” Manchin spokesperson Sam Runyon said in a statement to The Hill in March.