Senate Dems lay Climate Bill smackdown on boycotting Republicans

The Climate Bill has emerged victorious out of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, with Democratic members exploiting a loophole that negated their Rebublican peers’ three-day boycott.
Led by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who sponsored the bill with Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) 10 Democrats gave the bill their stamp of approval today without adding any amendments. Usually committees require to members of the minority party to agree to a bill’s markup before it can proceed. But Boxer turned to a little-used rule that a vote can be cast as long as a majority of committee members are present. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the group by 12 to 7.
The only Democrat not voting in favor of the bill, which would establish a carbon trading system in the U.S. and set renewable energy targets, was Max Baucus (D-Mont.). Notoriously opposed to some of the bill’s provisions — hailing from an industrial state that produced 44.8 million tons of coal last year — Baucus said he voted nay due to the committee’s reluctance to add amendments.
That said, he told his fellow Democrats that he ultimately wants to see the bill pass — as long as some of the carbon emissions limits are revised to be less stringent. Baucus serves as chair in the Finance Committee, where he will be able to take another stab at the bill’s language.
Republicans in the Environment and Public Works Committee opposed the bill on grounds that a full economic analysis had not yet been conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency. Led by James Inhofe, the senior senator from Oklahoma (which produced 1.5 million tons of coal in 2008), these members only attended the beginning of the legislation’s markup session, again asking the Democratic contingent to delay the bill. Inhofe dubbed Boxer’s loophole the “nuclear strategy,” and told reporters that he couldn’t recall a time when it had been used to push a bill markup forward.
As the New York Times pointed out, Boxer’s strategy might leave a sour taste in moderate Republican and Democrats’ mouths when it comes time for a general vote. The committee’s majority has already taken heat from newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter and South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham — who recently advocated for climate change legislation in a New York Times editorial co-authored with John Kerry. Still, Boxer and her followers say they are confident that these Senators will set partisan bitterness aside when called upon to pass the bill.
Now the legislation seems to be in an even more precarious position than it was before — simultaneously urgent and endangered.
It makes sense why Dems pushed the bill through committee so quickly, considering how much pressure the Obama administration is exerting on Congress to produce something before the end of the year. There is also a dire need for the U.S. to have viable climate measures to present at the U.N.’s December climate talks in Copenhagen. Let’s just hope speed isn’t the bill’s undoing.
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