It’s not likely to work, but Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) has hit on a novel approach in his attempt to convince the Obama administration to expand offshore drilling: block a pay-raise for Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Salazar took a pay cut when he left the Senate to join the Obama administration, because Article 1 of the Constitution bars lawmakers from serving in an executive position for which they voted a salary increase. Now that his Senate term has expired, Salazar is eligible to get that cash back. Not so fast, says Vitter:

“When the rate of permits issued for new deep-water exploratory wells reaches pre-moratorium levels . . . I will end my efforts to block your salary increase,” Vitter told Salazar in a letter sent Monday.

Salazar, for his part, has asked Harry Reid to forget about offering the raise. That suited Vitter just fine. “Now I hope he starts earning what he already makes and properly issues new permits for much needed drilling in the gulf,” he said.

UPDATE: Politico reports that Vitter’s actions may run afoul of federal bribery laws:

Vitter’s actions also tread close to federal statutes which make it a crime to offer anything of value to a public official “to influence any official act.”
In a letter to Salazar, Vitter explicitly said “I will end my efforts to block your salary increase” only when the rate of permits for deepwater wells had been increased by Interior to six per month. “It reads like the bribery statute,” said a Washington defense attorney with long experience dealing with such cases. And in a letter provided Tuesday to Capitol newspapers including POLITICO, Salazar— a former state attorney general in Colorado— asked that the pay bill be withdrawn rather than give in to what he saw as Vitter’s “attempted coercion of public acts here at the Department.”