The Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday cleared its budget bill, which included a similar ANWR drilling plan. That legislation goes to the full Senate for a vote next week.

Republican leaders want the drilling plan in budget legislation because Senate rules don't permit filibusters on the budget bill.

The House bill would also allow states to opt out of the federal ban that prevents energy exploration in most offshore waters. If states chose to allow drilling off their coasts, they would collect nearly half the royalty revenue paid by energy companies on the new production.

A Democratic-led effort to strike the ANWR drilling language from the House bill failed in a 10-to-21 vote.

Democrat Edward Markey of Massachusetts proposed that instead of drilling in the refuge, the Interior Department should raise the federal royalty fees paid by big oil companies, which he pointed out are earning record profits.

However, the committee's chairman, Republican Richard Pombo of California, said the United States should tap into the refuge's possible 10.4 billion barrels of crude "instead of paying too much for foreign oil and padding the pockets of foreign dictators and kleptocrats who fund the people who have declared war on America."

The refuge, which is about the size of South Carolina, sprawls across more than 19 million acres in northeastern Alaska. It is home to polar bears, musk oxen, caribou and migratory birds.

Under both the Senate and House drilling plans, ANWR's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain would be opened for energy exploration, but no more than 2,000 acres of the surface area could be covered by production and support facilities, including airstrips and piers to hold up pipelines.

Pombo's separate plan to allow states to drill in offshore waters where exploration is currently banned was the most controversial part of the House bill. Democrats strongly opposed the plan.

"I cannot comprehend the brilliance behind opening up our federal coastal resources to the whims of cash-strapped states," said Nick Rahall of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee.

"I was under the impression that destructive forces threatening our coastal resources and communities originated in the Atlantic Ocean, not Washington, D.C.," he said.

The chairman of the Senate's energy committee, Pete Domenici of New Mexico, said last week he did not think offshore drilling legislation can pass the Congress this year and he will not include such language in the massive budget bill that must clear both the House and Senate.