In a 219-to-212 vote this evening, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which will “for the first time put a price on carbon emissions” in the U.S. In the final minutes of the debate, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) threatened to obstruct the bill by reading 300 pages of amendments, but eventually relented and read only a few sentences from selected portions. Progressive Media compiled a video detailing the major arguments both for and against the bill. Watch it:
Despite promises that Republicans would rally against the bill, several members defected to support it, including Reps. Dave Reichart (R-WA), Mike Castle (R-DE), Mary Bono Mack, Mark Kirk (R-IL), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Chris Smith (R-NJ), and John McHugh (R-NY). 44 Democrats voted against the legislation. Reps. John Lewis (D-GA) and Pat Kennedy (D-RI) both returned to the floor for the first time after tending to significant health issues to support the legislation.
On his radio show today, global warming denier Glenn Beck played an audio clip of Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine speaking favorably of cap-and-trade, but saying it would be “difficult” to do it in Virginia alone. “This is something that is much better done, either on a very huge regional basis or a national basis,” said Kaine. Kaine’s comments caused Beck to accuse cap-and-trade supporters of being “the dumbest people to ever walk the face of the Earth,” “greedy,” “wicked” and even “treasonous“:
BECK: And these people know it. They are either the dumbest people to ever walk the face of the Earth, which I think some of them are. They are just greedy and just want their own power and their own control, which I think some of them are. Or, they believe in a different system other than the Republic, which I think some of them do. They are, they have exposed themselves as incompetent. They have exposed themselves as wicked. They have exposed themselves, quite honestly I think, as treasonous. I think some of them are treasonous. They have exposed themselves. Now the question is are there enough people in America still that believes in liberty and freedom and the Constitution?
By Peter Juul, Guest Blogger on Jun 26, 2009 at 7:00 pm
John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” JFK was speaking about Latin America in the wake of the Cuban revolution in the early 1960s, but the broader point he made – that disallowing non-violent political and social change ultimately undermines those who seek to prevent it – still stands today. Roger Cohen’s indefatigable reporting from Tehran over the last several days makes it clear that no matter how the current unrest pans out, the regime’s days are numbered: “All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a society inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war.”
Up until now, the regime has been able to survive so long because of its relative flexibility. Khomeini continued the slaughter of the Iran-Iraq war for six years beyond the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Iran, but agreed to a UN cease-fire after becoming convinced the United States was about to intervene more directly after the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian airliner in 1988. He ruefully called his acceptance of the cease-fire resolution “more deadly than taking poison.” His successor, the current Supreme Leader Khamenei, allowed a reformist, Mohammad Khatami, to win the presidency twice, but undermined his efforts toward liberalizing Iranian society and politics whenever he and the conservative establishment could.
Apparently Khamenei couldn’t face the prospect of another reformer winning power, no matter how moderate and committed to the system, and decided to fix the election. But he didn’t count on hundreds of thousands of average Iranians wanting their votes to mean something and demonstrating in the streets of major cities to make sure they did. Even then, though, the regime could have showed flexibility and maintained the general contours of the system. After all, the main challenger, Mir Hussein Mousavi, has solid credentials as a member of that system, and the framed his objections to the rigged vote in the context of fidelity to the 1979 revolution’s ideals.
Mousavi’s framing and the recent bloody crackdown have probably done deep damage to the regime’s legitimacy. Khamenei prevented President Khatami from making any real changes to the Iranian system when he was in power from 1997 to 2005, and prevented Mousavi, a committed disciple of the revolution, from winning the presidency by the system’s own rules. And when Iranians then protested peacefully and framed their demands in accordance with the system, Khamenei denounced them and then sicced the state’s security forces on them. What the Supreme Leader and his allies have done is made peaceful change within the regime’s system impossible. Read more
UPDATE: My Salon piece, “One brief shining moment for clean energy” is up. We do need to savor moments like these, since, as I note in that article, given modern conservative ideology, which is 100% anti-conservation, “the country can only contemplate serious environmental legislation when we have the unique constellation of a Democratic president and [large] Democratic majorities in both houses, an occurrence far rarer than a total eclipse of the sun.”
Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step “” including stopping human-caused global warming at “safe levels,” as close as possible to 2°C.
This bill makes possible an international deal in Copenhagen this December — as well as a bilateral deal with China, hopefully sooner. Had the bill failed, the chance of humanity avoiding catastrophic climate change would be all but eliminated. As Nobelist Gore wrote earlier today, there was no “backup plan” to Waxman-Markey. In this post, I will revise and extend the post I wrote after the bill passed the Energy and Commerce Committee (see “House committee approves landmark (bipartisan!) clean energy and climate bill “” political realists rejoice, climate science realists demand more“).
For climate-politics realists, the vote today is a staggering achievement. Today was the first time the U.S. House of Representatives has ever voted on climate legislation. This country hasn’t enacted a major economy-wide clean air bill since the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. And that bill had a cap-and-trade system where 97% of the permits were given to polluters. And it focused on direct, obvious, short-term health threats to Americans. And that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when the entire Republican establishment wasn’t dead set against any government led effort to reduce pollution.
Yet Waxman-Markey did get 8 Republican votes, which is 8 more than the stimulus bill got! This bill needed Republican votes, which will also be true in the Senate. The closeness of the House vote — with 44 Dems voting No — makes clear that the really hard work is yet to come.
In the earlier post, I discussed the myriad forces lined up against serious climate action. I won’t repeat that here, but instead want to excerpt something that David Corn wrote for Mother Jones, which states the climate-politics realist position very well — a position you might not associate with Corn and MJ:
Earlier this month, the Chamber of Commerce announced the $100 million Campaign for Free Enterprise, which Chamber President Tom Donohue called the “most important project the Chamber has embraced in its nearly 100-year history.” With the campaign, the Chamber is attempting to influence and obstruct a slew of upcoming legislation, including cap-and-trade, health care reform, and financial regulatory reform. On Wednesday, in fact, the Chamber condemned the House Democrats’ health care bill, calling it “broken beyond repair” and advocating that Congress “take this legislation back to the drawing board.”
Previously, no one had rebuked the Chamber’s approach. But last night, Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, appeared on Charlie Rose and said that businesses spending money to obstruct legislation like this is “just lunacy“:
From a business standpoint, the notion that businesses are going to put a bunch of money in ads to protect the status quo is just lunacy. It’s just not what we should be doing right now. Like I said, when I think about health care in a GE context, we’re going to win some, we’re going to lose some on health care. But I think it would be totally inappropriate for GE to be saying we don’t need health care reform right now. We do.
Watch it:
It’s in the interest of big business to get health care costs down, a notion that Immelt seems to grasp. As Igor Volsky pointed out, our health care system — by leaving so many uninsured and not embracing new technologies or comparative effectiveness research — “inflates health care costs and expects businesses to pick-up the tab.” General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner has admitted that a national health care program could have helped the auto industry avert financial disaster.
So are there any other corporation’s out there that also think the Chamber’s campaign is lunacy? Or do the likes of Nike, UPS, and Duke Energyall believe that the Chamber is really doing what’s best for business?
Earlier this month, the Chamber of Commerce announced the $100 million Campaign for Free Enterprise, which Chamber President Tom Donohue called the “most important project the Chamber has embraced in its nearly 100-year history.” With the campaign, the Chamber is attempting to influence and obstruct a slew of upcoming legislation, including cap-and-trade, health care reform, and financial regulatory reform. On Wednesday, in fact, the Chamber condemned the House Democrats’ health care bill, calling it “broken beyond repair” and advocating that Congress “take this legislation back to the drawing board.”
Previously, no one had rebuked the Chamber’s approach. But last night, Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, appeared on Charlie Rose and said that businesses spending money to obstruct legislation like this is “just lunacy“:
From a business standpoint, the notion that businesses are going to put a bunch of money in ads to protect the status quo is just lunacy. It’s just not what we should be doing right now. Like I said, when I think about health care in a GE context, we’re going to win some, we’re going to lose some on health care. But I think it would be totally inappropriate for GE to be saying we don’t need health care reform right now. We do.
Watch it:
It’s in the interest of big business to get health care costs down, a notion that Immelt seems to grasp. As Igor Volsky pointed out, our health care system — by leaving so many uninsured and not embracing new technologies or comparative effectiveness research — “inflates health care costs and expects businesses to pick-up the tab.” General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner has admitted that a national health care program could have helped the auto industry avert financial disaster.
So are there any other corporation’s out there that also think the Chamber’s campaign is lunacy? Or do the likes of Nike, UPS, and Duke Energyall believe that the Chamber is really doing what’s best for business?
I think that analytically honest political commentators right now should be struggling with a pretty hard choice: Do you try to maximize the possibility of good, if still insufficient, outcomes? Or do you admit what many people already know and say that our political process has gone into total system failure and the overriding priority is building the long-term case for structural reform of America’s lawmaking process? Put another way, can you really solve any of our policy problems until you solve our fundamental political problem? And don’t think about it in terms of when your team is in power. Think of it in terms of the next 30 years, and the challenges we face.
I think that this is a bit of a false choice. Normally, procedural and substantive reforms go together. Certainly you saw that the substantive legislation of the Civil Rights and Great Society period were intimately related to reforms of how congress operated. The New Deal required a revamping of Supreme Court constitutional doctrine and the construction of a modern administrative state apparatus. Even in 2009, it’s important to recall that the essential backdrop of today’s Waxman-Markey vote (substantive) was Henry Waxman’s successful challenge to John Dingell to helm the Energy & Commerce Committee.
For Waxman, there was no contradiction between seeking a substantive reform of energy policy and seeking a procedural shakeup. The problem is that very few other senior Democrats seem to be thinking Waxman-style. In particular, almost nobody in the United States Senate seems willing to admit that the Senate’s rules are a huge impediment to sound public policy rather than cute and lovable quirks.
While budget rules, such as the pay-as-you-go rule, can be important, actual policy decisions that will be made in the next few months will be far more important in demonstrating a real commitment to begin dealing with the long-term fiscal problem. In particular, the decisions that are made about health reform will be crucial. Whether a statutory pay-as-you-go rule is enacted or not, it is essential for the Congress and the President to demonstrate a commitment to the pay-as-you-go principle by fully paying for the cost of health care reform over the next 10 years. That will require some painful steps, such as adopting politically unpopular changes both in tax laws and in payments to health care providers. But if Congress and the President do not demonstrate that they are willing to take such steps to keep from making an already unsustainable fiscal situation worse, the enactment of a statutory pay-as-you-go rule will ring hollow and will not persuade anyone (including financial markets) that policymakers are willing to deal in a real way with the problems we face. In addition, it is absolutely crucial that the health reform that is enacted produces changes in our health system that begin taking the steps necessary to slow the growth of health care costs systemwide (i.e., in both the public and private sectors). We will never be able to ensure sustainability of the federal budget — or the health of the economy — unless we bring down the growth rate of those costs.
Something that pure budget analysis doesn’t get at on this subject is just the pure politics of it. A lot of people look around and see a world in which we had PAYGO rules in the 1990s and we declining budget deficits and then a small surplus. Then we had a Republican President and suddenly hugely expensive tax cuts—tax cuts that all Republicans and many Democrats voted for—didn’t need to be paid for. We also had a hugely expensive war that all Republicans and many Democrats voted for that didn’t need to be paid for. And PAYGO rules were suspended. Now there are progressive majorities and PAYGO is magically coming back. And aspirations for universal health care are being constrained by the need to pay.
Now, I think it’s a good thing that the administration has committed to pay for its health care proposals. But ultimately it takes two to tango here. And somehow we’ve gotten into a dynamic where not only Republicans, but also a certain number of moderate Democrats, seem to believe that conservative ideas don’t need to be paid for but progressive ideas do. That’s not a sustainable situation.
John F. Kennedy once said, “
