More Senate Sausagemaking — How the Climate Change Bill Failed

The New Yorker has a great article from Ryan Lizza detailing how the Climate Change Bill came together in the Senate, and how it came apart.  Do yourself a favor and read The Whole Thing.  The subtitle doesn’t do this article any justice and is really pretty wrong.

What is clear from this is that a bill of any kind was going to be a pretty heavy lift and a very long shot in this Senate.    But there are two really big takeaways here:

Back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’ ”

As the Dems tried to get a Republican on board, that Republican had to be cautious of the political activism of a the fake journalists over at Fox. And he knew that not only would they bang their drum on this (pretending to be fair and balanced) but they would lie their asses off in the service of their activist “reporting”. So not only is Fox Noise the PR arm of the GOP, it is also in the business of keeping Republican lawmakers in line. Not exactly a journalistic enterprise, right?

In September, I asked Al Gore why he thought climate legislation had failed. He cited several reasons, including Republican partisanship, which had prevented moderates from becoming part of the coalition in favor of the bill. The Great Recession made the effort even more difficult, he added. “The forces wedded to the old patterns still have enough influence that they were able to use the fear of the economic downturn as a way of slowing the progress toward this big transition that we have to make.”

A third explanation pinpointed how Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman approached the issue. “The influence of special interests is now at an extremely unhealthy level,” Gore said. “And it’s to the point where it’s virtually impossible for participants in the current political system to enact any significant change without first seeking and gaining permission from the largest commercial interests who are most affected by the proposed change.”

One of the things that Lizza does not get into here is whether — if all of these special deals were actually implemented as part of an approved bill — the emissions targets would have ever been met. I suspect not — given that the cap and trade facility proposed would have given away plenty of credits and would have *increased* incentives for fossil fuels. Not to mention that it would have increased nuclear power plant construction which means that taxpayers are still left with a massive waste storage problem. But Al Gore does point out the real horror here — that here is serious government policy which needs not the permission of voters, but the permission of corporations who will be affected. And those corporations walk away from these conversations with a promised chunk of taxpayer dollars for work that they already ought to be doing as a regular cost of doing business. And note how easily these Senators just promised your money away — even as the Grahams and the Liebermans rail against government debt in other venues. More debt is just fine if it means that the people writing them checks are still writing them checks.

While it seems that the Obama Administration seems to have made plenty of mistakes in getting around to this bill, Lizza’s claim that 5 or so Republicans were on board seems awfully fishy. 5 republican votes for something that would be a major win for the Administration doesn’t ring true — when repubs have been pretty solid in opposition to everything else. There were plenty of Democrats with issues on this bill and I expect that 5 repubs would not have gotten this bill to 60 votes. And if this had 60 votes, I don’t think that there would have been so little WH attention to this.

Still this is an excellent (if long) look at how the Senate works — or in this case, doesn’t work.