Difficult Votes in House Left Vulnerable Democrats to be Crucified at the Ballot Box
Commenting on a column penned by Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Chait is surprised more haven’t made the same recrimination. Seib writes:
In June 2009, just six months into the Obama era, House leaders brought to a vote a broad, highly ambitious bill to attack climate change, in part by changing American energy habits and in part by instituting a new cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gases. That bill presented an extraordinarily tough vote for lawmakers from coal-producing and industrial states, because the carbon cap was seen as a threat to both the coal industry and to energy and manufacturing plants across the upper Midwest.
That might have been a political risk worth taking if the legislation was about to roar ahead on the wings of popular demand. Instead, House members cast this hard, politically risky vote on a bill that proceeded to go—nowhere. The Senate not only didn't take up the bill, it moved on instead to health care, while a handful of senators sought to write a different version of climate-change legislation that failed to fly.
So a handful of brave Democrats put their necks on the line for what has turned out to be a meaningless vote. Now those lawmakers—Rick Boucher in Virginia and John Boccieri and Zack Space in Ohio most notably—are being pilloried for their troubles. If those Democrats lose, and Democrats lose the House by a couple of seats, they can look back on cap-and-trade and wonder.
In response, Chait argued that there was never any real hope of cap-and-trade passing the Senate, and he notes that the one political move that clearly backfired on Democrats in the 111th Congress was trying to move massive climate change legislation.
New Energy Technology Should Be the American Mission for the 21st Century
The steam-powered engine launched the industrial revolution in the 19th century; the automobile drove the America’s petroleum-based economy into post World War II prosperity; and the development of the personal computer and the internet launched nothing less than a information revolution in at the end 20th century. The next great technology-driven revolution in the American economy in the 21st century is going to be the development green energy technology.
We, in the United States, are at a unique moment in history to change the way we power this country, but the opportunity is slipping out of our grasp. That is why Tom Friedman lamented this morning in his New York Times column that ”America’s Democratic and Republican leaders [are] conspiring to ensure that America cedes the next great global industry to China.” Referring to the development of green energy technology, Friedman rightly chastised Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, for pushing immigration reform ahead of the bipartisan climate/energy bill that was supposed to be unveiled on Monday. That is, until Senator Lindsey Graham justifiably stalled it in protest because an immigration bill doesn’t even exist yet, and Reid moved it up on the agenda for his own obvious electoral advantage in Nevada.
Getting to the Bottom of Cap-and-Trade
Over the weekend, Paul Krugman wrote a fantastic article in the New York Times Magazine discussing the economics of climate change. Among other things, he made the keen observation regarding a market-based approach to curbing green-house gas emissions, such as the kind of cap-and-trade system devised in the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454). He noted that it is already being used effectively in the United States to limit the emission of sulfur dioxide, a known contributor to acid rain.
Krugman writes that:
The Clean Air Act of 1990 introduced a cap-and-trade system in which power plants could buy and sell the right to emit sulfur dioxide, leaving it up to individual companies to manage their own business within the new limits. Sure enough, over time sulfur-dioxide emissions from power plants were cut almost in half, at a much lower cost than even optimists expected; electricity prices fell instead of [rose]. Acid rain did not disappear as a problem, but it was significantly mitigated.
Libertarianism, Democrats, and the West
The libertarian strain that permeates throughout Colorado--and the interior West more broadly--has always made the region difficult to place within the traditional liberal-conservative ideological divide. At various times and depending on the issue, both Democrats and Republicans have been able to court the libertarian vote. But, libertarians are a finicky bunch and, they have always been uneasy about declaring a strict allegiance to either party. Despite a decades long partnership with the GOP, the Republican Party's tilt toward the socially conservative South, along with President Bush's 'big-government conservatism' made this sparsely populated region fertile ground for the Democrats. Yet, months of bailouts, frustration with Obama's management of the economy and with his bungled health care campaign, not to mention Congress's passage of cap and trade, has turned the West's marriage of convenience with the Democrats into a relationship destined for divorce.
A recently published article in the Economist reminds us that, despite the Democrats recent electoral success, the West is not a preserve of electoral blue; rather, it's a vast ocean of purple. I published an article in the Loveland Reporter Herald in 2005, a few months after the 2004 election, noting the Democratic trend in the Rocky Mountain West. In an election year where Republicans routed the Democrats nationally and pundits were talking about the possibility of a permanent Republican majority, Montana, Arizona and New Mexico all had Democratic Governors; and Colorado voters voted the Republican majority in both houses of state legislature out of office, elected Democrat Ken Salazar to the U.S. Senate and his brother Tom Salazar to Congress.
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