Now this dance is over. After emerging from their closed door session on the fabricated intelligence used to sell the Iraq war (supposedly evidence of spinal-column regeneration by Democrats), the Senate proceed to once again doom the nation's most treasured wildlife refuge. With a 51-48 pro-drilling vote yesterday on a deviously-crafted line item in the U.S. Senate's budget bill, the oil industry has seized its most prized trophy: access to reservoirs of crude beneath the 1.5 million-acre wildlife refuge on the Arctic plain.

ANWR used to be an icon of the power of the environmental movement. Now it stands as a symbol of its impotence. With ANWR, the most sacrosanct stretch of land in North America, now pried open to the drillers, everywhere else, from the Rocky Mountain Front to the coasts of Florida, Oregon and California, is fair game.

It didn't come easy and in the end it took a feat of procedural prestidigitation and the participation of a few well-placed Democrats to seal ANWR's fate.

Over the last decade, as the Republicans' grip on Congress has tightened, the fate of ANWR has depended on the judicious invocation of the filibuster by anti-drilling forces in the senate. Even as the drilling block gained a majority, they were never able to muster the 60 votes needed for cloture, and the measure was repeatedly abandoned in the doldrums of limitless senate debate.

In the past, ANWR measures have originated in the appropriations and energy committees. But this time, the drilling scheme was secreted inside the rules for the 2006 congressional budget resolution, which protected the proposal from blockage by a filibuster.

This bit of legislative trickery was devised by Senator Ted Stevens. On the eve of the senate vote, Stevens told his hometown paper, the Anchorage Daily News, that he had been suffering from "clinical depression" for the past three years over his inability to nail ANWR. "I'm really depressed, as a matter of fact, I'm seriously -- I'm seriously depressed," Stevens told the News. "Unfortunately, clinically depressed. I've been told that, because I've just been at this too long, 24 years arguing to get Congress to keep its word. I'm really getting to the point where I'm taking on people even in my own party that do things that I don't think is fair. You get to that point where you're challenging your colleagues -- that's not exactly good. I really am very, very disturbed."

You can see why Stevens got a little sweaty. As the crucial vote neared, he witnessed the defection of seven Republican senators: John McCain, Gordon Smith, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee, Mike DeWine and Norm Coleman.

The architect of Alaskan statehood and chief facilitator of the transfer of the state's public resources to corporations bristled at critiques from some in his own party that he had used sleazy tactics to secure victory. "The only reason we're doing it [in the budget] is they filibustered for 24 years," Stevens, dressed for battle in his "Incredible Hulk" tie, shouted on the floor of the senate, pounding his fist on the podium. "Twenty-four years!"

If there's any good news to come out of this, it's that Stevens, one of the most flagrantly corrupt members of congress, vows he'll retire once ANWR is opened. Of course, with at least a decade's worth of lawsuits in the works, he'll be mouldering in his grave long before a gallon of ANWR crude ever sluices down the pipeline to Valdez.

The razor-thin victory in the senate hinged on the votes of three key Democrats: the Hawai'ians Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka and Mary Landrieu from the Cajun oil patch.

The Alaska and Hawaii delegations cruise through the congress like synchronized swimmers, voting harmoniously when it comes to matters involving the wishes of either state. They entered the union together, and they will leave it in ruins together. Inouye calls Stevens his "brother". Akaka, who fashions himself as the senate's most vocal defender of native rights, said piously he was "saddened" that his vote trampled the concerns of the G'wichin tribe, who live near the refuge and are subsistence hunters of the Porcupine caribou herd, which is threatened by drilling.

When it comes to oil policy, Louisiana can be counted on to make it a threesome. So it was no surprise to see Democrat Mary Landrieu offer her vote to the oil cartel. She was simply following the path blazed years before by her Democratic Party predecessors Bennett Johnston and John Breaux.

A share of the blame for the loss of ANWR must fall at the feet of Bill Clinton, Bruce Babbitt, and the claque of environmentalists who winked at the Clinton administration's incursions into the Arctic for eight years. When Clinton opened to drilling the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, only 90 miles to the west of ANWR and a landscape of almost identical ecological features, Babbitt vowed that the oil could be extracted without leaving anything more than a toeprint on the tundra. Bush and Stevens used almost identical language to describe their plans for ANWR. So the Clintonoids set the precedent for "environmentally-benign" oil drilling in fragile ecosystems; they opened the gates to drilling ANWR.

In pushing for ANWR drilling, Bush emphasized the role Alaska oil would play in boosting domestic supplies. But no one is really sure if there's much oil under the tundra at all, and even the rosiest scenarios proffered by the oil lobby suggest a big strike would only sate the nation's oil thirst for something in the order of six months. In fact, the oil companies, which have poked and prodded the edges of the Refuge for years with exploratory wells, are all that excted about ANWR. They don't believe there's that much oil in the Refuge and they know it's going to be a very expensive and protracted ordeal to extract the crude and transport it down the trans-Alaska pipeline to those supertankers in Valdez.

Another villain in this saga has been the Teamsters Union, under the leadership of James Hoffa Jr. Hoffa has worked hand-in-hand with the union-busting Ted Stevens on ANWR drilling measures over the past five years. Hoffa hailed Stevens' arm-twisting tactics and praised the vote as a victory for the union. "For the Teamsters, the primary motive for our support of this effort has been constant and singular - job creation," Hoffa gloated. "The Teamsters will continue to fight to open ANWR until we have succeeded. We look forward to putting this prolonged national debate behind us and getting to work at developing the resources of ANWR."

The losing bid to keep the drillers out of ANWR was led by two Democrats who have yet to relinquish designs on the White House: John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. This humiliating defeat should send them both packing through the exit along with Ted Stevens. But they will cling on, deploying the same worn tactics that led to the corporate routs on the bankruptcy and class action lawsuit bills.

ANWR has always been more about power politics than energy policy. Over the past two-decades the Democrats and the greens establishment had been able to stalement the Republicans. But now, even with a terminally weakened Bush, that balance of power has shifted.

At this rate, only the Republicans will be able to save Social Security or anything else.