Democrats are playing politics while your family budget burns:

The reality is we will have a new president in three months, and what Bush and the Republicans are trying to do amounts to a land grab for the oil companies,” said one senior House Democratic aide involved with party strategy. “I don’t think we have to give in at all pre-election — we have many more options postelection.”

It’s a reality that Rep. Nick J. Rahall (D-W.Va.) personally delivered to President Bush recently.

Rahall spent more than an hour last week talking to the president about energy. Bush spent the entire flight aboard Air Force One, and much of a subsequent limousine ride, grilling the West Virginia Democrat about legislative solutions to the high price of gasoline, Rahall said last week.

So, does the president think Congress can get anything done this year?

“No,” Rahall replied in a short interview with Politico. “He’s realistic about it.”

Asked if Congress will produce a comprehensive energy bill in September before Congress adjourns again for elections, Rahall replied, “This year? No.”

Instead, the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources believes Democrats are all about 2009.

“We’ve laid the groundwork this year,” Rahall said.

Democratic House aides say the energy agenda has been carefully gamed out in strategy sessions, and Pelosi always intended to take heat on gas prices while tacitly encouraging more vulnerable Democrats to publicly disagree with her and show their independence.

“Doing the business of the American people?” No, giving the American people the business, while pretending to care more about the average Joes they’re screwing than the Repubs do. It’s Democrat ass-backwards no-energy policies that have led us to this sorry pass, and they intend to wriggle out of the just consequences by any means they can think of, fair or foul. They are, as I said last week, scum. Period.

“We feel pretty comfortable with where we are,” said Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.), who is close to the Democratic leadership. “This is a not a new issue. This just didn’t happen today. We’ve been working on this for months.”

You’ve been working on it for decades, actually, and with 4 buck per gallon gas, your plans have at last come to fruition.

“There is no crisis on our side of the aisle,” a top House Democratic leadership aide said. “We have a plan, and we will stick to it.”

No matter how much damage it does to the American economy. No matter how much fiscal pain it causes Americans of modest means. What matters to these swine is political power and their socialist agenda — nothing whatsoever else. If any effete, moderate marshmallows think it’s “uncivil” of me to notice that simple fact, well, too effing bad. I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em, and what I’m seeing right now is Social Democrat unscrupulousness of the lowest and most damaging sort.

Update! Allahpundit puts it far more gently than I’ll ever bother to:

The point, of course, is to protect the current majority and stall until the election, when they’re bound to pick up seats and can use their new leverage next year to water down any GOP drilling proposals even further than they might now. In other words, they’re running out the clock — on the public, which overwhelmingly supports action in this area and is going to get much less of it if Pelosi’s strategy works.

Or, put my way: they screwed us in the past, they’re screwing us now, and they plan to go right on screwing us after the election. Their ethical depravity is exceeded only by their high-handed imperiousness.

Updated update! Don’t ever let it be said that the Dems’ blockhead policies don’t get results.