A cap and trade bill by Joe Lieberman and John Warner is set to be introduced tomorrow in the Senate. It's basically the biggest corporate giveaway in history. Here's Friends of the Earth:
The Friends of the Earth analysis found that the coal industry in particular stands to benefit from this legislation, precisely because it is currently the industry most responsible for global warming pollution. Depending on market conditions, the coal industry could receive permits worth up to $231 billion in the first year alone, 48 percent of the total permit allocation. It could then sell or "trade" its permits to others for their cash value, or it could emit at no cost carbon that less fortunate industries would have to pay to emit.
The Bush administration issued a pre-emptive veto threat on energy legislation late Monday, attaching a long list of demands that Democrats rejected out of hand.
Among the demands was a warning against raising taxes - effectively forbidding Democratic efforts to roll back billions in tax breaks for oil companies - and opposition to requiring power companies to increase the use of renewable electricity.
There's a huge temptation to 'do something' about global warming right now in Congress. The Energy Bill could be that 'something', but it's going to be vetoed unless all the good stuff is pulled out.
Warner-Lieberman is the next in the temptation queue. There's an interesting environmental split here, since Environmental Defense and other useful idiots to the wealthy are backing Lieberman-Warner while progressive groups like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club are not. It's tailor made for Lieberman, who gets to appear as if he's doing something on global warming while actually giving away more to corporate interests than the government has ever considered.
I'm told that Warner just offered a companion "Sense of the Congress/Senate" amendment. We don't know what's in it, but sense of the Congress/Senate resolutions usually do nothing. Most likely, this is a fig leaf for Republicans to vote for so they can pretend they don't consistently undermine American soldiers.
Apparently Warner is still in the 'reconsidering posture', which is in fact a Republican yoga move, and not to be confused with a 'wide stance'.
Also, habeas failed to reach cloture with a 56-41 vote, but that's not necessarily bad news. I'll have more soon.
...in an interview Tuesday, the senator said he is "reconsidering his position" in light of the administration's willingness to move closer to him on expediting some reduction in U.S. troop levels this year in Iraq. "It took a lot of convincing to make the first units come home before Christmas," Mr. Warner said. "There is a lot of importance in that."
But the 13th MEU, a support unit that has been in Iraq on its current tour for about three months, was already scheduled to return home from Iraq on Nov. 17. Their new date of arrival under the drawdown plan? Still Nov. 17.
This legislation gives reasonable deployment breaks to soldiers so the military doesn't break, and it has bipartisan support. Last time we got 56 votes for this, and with Tim Johnson it's 57. We only need three more to break with the Republicans to get this to pass. Senator Webb explains his amendment to the internets and why it's important to take action.
Here's the target list. Please call and ask these senators to support Jim Webb's pro-troop amendment:
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
DC: 202-224-6665
Anchorage: 907-271-3735
George Voinovich (R-Ohio)
DC: (202) 224-3353
Cleveland: (216) 522-7095
Elizabeth Dole (R-North Carolina)
DC: 202-224-6342
Raleigh: 866-420-6083
John Warner (R-Virginia)
DC: (202) 224-2023
Roanoke: (540) 857-2676
Bonus - Ask Harry Reid to "don't let Republicans obstruct - make them stand and filibuster":
Harry Reid
DC: 202-224-3542
Las Vegas: 702-388-5020
UPDATE: Sure enough, Saint John Warner the Bipartisan Dreamboat is considering changing his vote because Bush promised him that a few thousand troops are coming home next year.
David Kurtz at TPM and Lowell Feld at Raising Kaine wrote about Bush seeking to appoint a radical right-winger to the bench for the 2nd court of appeals. No surprise there. What's interesting is that he's rejecting advice from both Virginia Senators, John Warner and Jim Webb. Typically, the White House will defer to home state Senators on appointments made to courts in their area, so this is unusual. Senator Jim Webb is mad.
"Today, despite our good faith, bipartisan effort to accommodate the President, the recommendations that Senator Warner and I made have been ignored. The White House talks about the spirit of bipartisanship, lamenting congressional obstructionism. The White House cannot expect to complain about the confirmation of federal judges when they proceed to act in this manner."
So is Senator John Warner, who, though he's a Republican and therefore complicit in the horror that is the Bush administration, did save us from Senator Ollie North in 1994 by campaigning against him.
I steadfastly remain committed to the recommendations stated in my joint letter with Senator Webb to the president, dated June 12, 2007, and I have so advised in a respectful, consistent manner in my consultations with the White House senior staff.
Bush just doesn't care anymore about attacking and undermining anyone and everyone, even and in some ways especially his own allies. It's not his problem, in 18 months he's going to be 'refilling the ole coffers'. But the trust he's ripped apart within the Republican Party is going to take decades to repair.
I generally take the last week in August off because it's almost always the second slowest week in national politics (after only the week between Christmas and New Year's Day- and with the early caucuses this year, that week won't be so slow either). But with the Republicans around to entertain us, the last week wasn't so slow. Since I've been gone:
-Alberto Gonzales finally resigned
-Larry Craig resigned after his public restroom escapades were revealed
-The overwhelmingly negative GAO report on Iraq came out
-John Warner decided to retire
-Tony Snow also decided to take off
That's a pretty big week for an October of an election year, let alone the last week in August. And all of it bad news for the Republicans. I guess I should go on vacation more often.
It's always fascinating to be back home in the Midwest when big national news is going on, because that part of the country is the ultimate in low information news, and it's fascinating to see what sinks in and how people back home react to it. The Lincoln Journal-Star and Omaha World-Herald are both terrible papers, and the local TV news is pretty awful as well. High-speed internet is available in Lincoln, but not at all on the family farm, or small towns surrounding it, and people don't tend to check it much for news. People sometimes watch CNN or Fox News to get national news, but as we know, that's not exactly informative coverage.
So which of these big stories got noticed? John Warner got a small page three story, but was hardly noticed or talked about except among my total political junkie friends. Gonzalez resigning was noticed, and people mentioned it, mostly being relieved. The GAO report got a tiny ripple, but people are so used to bad news about Iraq that it didn't receive any comment at all. But the Larry Craig story was very, very big. That combination of scandal, sex and hypocrisy, with a dash of politics mixed in, was irresistible, and everybody and their mother (mine included) talked about it a lot. Good old-fashioned family fun.
The monumental challenges of building a national progressive majority really settle in after weeks like this at home, with a lot of important stories happening but not much notice of the ones that don't involve playing footsie in public restrooms. Having a national broadband policy like the one Matt Stoller and Dick Durbin have been working on in the Legislation 2.0 project would certainly help, but it's going to take a lot more organizing, both in terms of our political organizing and communicating, and in terms of building new strategies for media.
I'd love to know what ideas the OpenLeft.com community has in terms of getting a consistent message out in smaller states and in rural communities.
It is very likely that Republicans will pick up no more than one seat, while Democrats may pick up as many as seven seats--and very likely, counting losses, somewhere between one and five. That will give them (counting Bernie Sanders and the apostate Joe Lieberman) at the very worst their existing 51-49 margin, but more likely somewhere between 53-47 and 59-41. That is not enough to withstand a filibuster on controversial labor law reform legislation, but probably enough--with a Democrat in the White House--to pass some version of national health insurance.
I'll note one thing here. The political instincts of elite decision-makers are based on experience, and experience suggests that the 2000-2004 map is pretty fixed. Red states are red states, and blue states are blue states, swing districts are swing districts, etc. That's just natural. Humans just like to think that if something happened yesterday and the day before yesterday and the day before that, it's going to happen again tomorrow. It gives people a feeling of control.
The problem of course, is that making political assumptions this way precludes the possibility that large numbers of people have changed their minds. And yet, that's exactly what's happened. Here's a map by Professor James Stimson on public policy preferences from 1952-2004.
Democrats are going to pick up lots of Senate seats, which is a symptom of a dramatic change in public sentiment. Elite decision-makers haven't picked up on this yet, so some of them are going to be removed from office.
I learned last year that Senator Joe Lieberman is brilliant man with an unbelievable ability to ignore reality. In 2006, he spent his election campaign promising to bring the troops home from Iraq, and promptly reversed course after winning reelection, going even further with belligerent rhetoric against Iran. Now he's working on something even bigger than the Iraq war - an economy-wide bill on climate change.
We all know that Lieberman cannot be trusted, but to understand the problem with his particular approach to global warming, you need to get that the Senate is far ahead of the deniers but is focused on how to regulate carbon. There are a whole host of bills on carbon (you can track them at Hillheat.com), but only the Sanders-Boxer bill does what is needed. The rest of them are worse than nothing. If you pass a big piece of legislation, we'll have to wait at least five years before understanding it hasn't worked, which is five years we don't have. And with that in mind, here's Lieberman's latest.
The bill from Warner and Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tries to limit the cost of mandating reductions of greenhouse gas emissions through an emissions cap-and-trade program.
Their bill would allow companies to borrow emission permits and pay them back in future years with interest and to buy more offsets to meet their emission requirements. The bill establishes a seven-member, president-appointed Carbon Market Efficiency Board to oversee the carbon emissions market and, if necessary, permit a temporary increase in emission allocations when prices remain high.
The Senate would have to confirm the board members, who would have 14-year terms.
Basically this bill sets up a complicated scheme to give away carbon rights to industry, and don't worry, if the price of carbon goes to high, the government ll just let more into the atmosphere. It is, in other words, a fraud, designed not to work.
Backing the bill is environmental DLC group Environmental Defense, and their President Fred Krupp. There's no nice way to say this, so I'll just say it. Krupp has been selling out the environmental movement for years.
I'm trying to get my head around the climate change debate, and there's quite a bit here, obviously. There's the Farm bill, the Energy bill, transportation, and a whole host of regulatory agencies. But coming down the pike this fall are a series of economy-wide measures to regulate carbon. We shouldn't pass anything until 2009, when the next President takes office, because Bush won't sign anything that solves the problem. We need to be sure that the bill that goes through works, and this Congress can't get a bill like that done.
There's useful stuff to get done right now on carbon policy. But going for full bore cap and trade, with people like Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln, Warner, Graham and Krupp in charge, will be a disaster.
STATE BLOGS
