Under the current rules of the Senate, if you don’t have 60 votes you can’t pass anything. There are two main avenues for obtaining 60 votes. The first is to compromise. You let a few individual lawmakers have a major role in constructing the legislation, which normally entails the watering down of your goals. This is how both the Stimulus Bill and Health Care Reform managed to pass. Of course, this kind of compromise can also involve giving out goodies, like NIH funding for Arlen Specter or medicaid reimbursement deals for Ben Nelson. But the idea is to give something away in return for support.
The second way to get to 60 votes is to make your opponents fear the consequences of opposing you. And this is how the Wall Street Reform bill got passed in the Senate. Now, a debate has opened up within the Democratic Caucus about which strategy to pursue on Climate Change legislation. On one side is Harry Reid and the liberals who want to take advantage of the current unpopularity of Big Oil to strike fear into the hearts of Republicans. On the other side are the centrists, who seek accommodation:
Centrist Democrats argue that energy and climate change is substantially different than Wall Street reform. Polls showed widespread anger at big Wall Street banks but public opinion over how to address energy and climate change is mixed.
“People were angry at Wall Street and I don’t think there’s the same anger aimed even now at the oil industry,” said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.
Kessler and other centrists believe that Reid needs to push a unifying message that energy and climate change reform will spur the economy.
“This has got to be about an economic message, creating clean-energy jobs and having America lead the world,” said Kessler. “This can’t be about evil corporations; it’s got to be about American opportunity.”
Sen. Evan Bayh, a centrist from Indiana, said: “It’s always easier to take a firmer line when the public is behind you and the polls indicate that financial regular reform is popular.”
Of course, there is precious little consideration here about the merits of policy. Progressives tend to focus on what is needed. And, when it comes to Climate Change, bold action is required. Normally, something is better than nothing, but on this issue you may face a tipping point on warming. In that case, there may be no substantive difference between something and nothing. Instead of taking this threat seriously, the debate is all about tactics.
That’s a shame. But the tactics do matter. And I think Harry Reid is on the right side of this particular argument.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and other Democratic Senate leaders doubt that playing nice with Republicans will yield much cooperation.
“The reason we were successful on Wall Street reform is that we were able to show a sharp contrast,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. “We had a foil: Wall Street; and we had an enabler: the Republicans.”
Democratic leaders see a similar dynamic in the energy and climate change debate.
“You’ve got a very unsympathetic target in big oil,” said the aide. “Big oil earns billions in profits and it doesn’t invest in the safety mechanism necessary to keep millions of gallons from spreading along the Gulf Coast.
“And you’re going to see a Republican Party side with big oil,” the aide added.
Politically, the president is going to take a hit all summer because of his inability to shut down the oil leak in the Gulf. Getting the Republicans to stand in unison in defense of Big Oil is definitely one way to limit the damage. And there is a good chance that the Republicans’ unity will crack. I think being aggressive makes it more likely that we get a strong bill and that a bill passes. But it is also smart from electoral point of view.
So, I think the centrists are going to lose this argument.
On immigration reform, which this article also discusses, I don’t see raw aggression as yielding results. But I don’t see compromise working either. I just don’t see any way to get a vote out of the Senate this year for immigration reform.
“It’s always easier to take a firmer line when the public is behind you and the polls indicate that financial regular reform is popular.”
And Bayh wonders why people hate people like him. Because they don’t lead!! But Bayh leading would expose the bankruptcy of DLC ideas.
I don’t even know what a strong bill would look like. What’s needed is policy that would be felt at all levels of the economy in the form of higher energy costs and probably resulting general inflation. That would be a strong bill, but will never even get a mention. A strong bill would shut down all new offshore drilling. Not on the table.
A strong bill, in essence would set as top priority ending the fossil economy within 20 years, doing whatever it takes to accomplish that. There’s nothing in the bill, strong or not, that even approaches such a perspective. Politically, short term stuff like ending liability limits on oilcos should play well. I guess I think the whole idea of a climate change bill, as if it’s a separate issue from energy, transportation, the environment, and the economy, just creates a mushy hodgepodge that blurs rather than sharpening perceptions.
Don’t think the GOP wants to spend the summer filibustering a climate change bill, assuming the dems can successfully frame the GOP as coddling big oil. That being said, legislation will be watered down and weakened whether the GOP plays along or not. There are a lot of incentives for whoever the 58th, 59th and 60th vote is, whether GOP or Dem, to serve the interests of industry. Names change, but the power of those last votes is constant. I have a feeling that Climate change will play out like health care- a hugely watered down centrist bill that is demagogued on the right, disliked by progressives and lots of members of our team playing the role of useful idiot for industry at every turn. And this should not suprise anyone. Obama gave Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman a pass after HCR instead of telling them that substantive votes are between each senator, his/her constituents and his/her god, but procedural votes are the price of access to the DNC, DSCC and getting your calls returned by my cabinet.
You know why we won’t have comprehensive energy policy in our lifetimes? We overly romanticize and sympathize with residents of energy producing states dependent on coal mining and oil drilling. To be more specific, we are beholden to the economic interests of the fastest declining population in the country: poor uneducated white men dependent on fossil fuel based economies. Coal miners in Appalachia and oil drillers in the Gulf are literally holding our energy policy hostage. There is nothing more Norman Rockwell or Americana than a white man in overalls with black soot covering his face and a lunch pail or the image of a hot sweaty white man looking up at an oil gusher blanketing the sky. As progressive as Rockefeller may be on all other issues, he will NEVER vote for anything other than symbolic energy policy. Mary Landrieu? Come on! Instead of doing what we should: setting up a huge entitlement program for these workers and phasing their jobs out, we waste hundreds of millions of dollars developing “clean coal” and “safe drilling” to create a “harmonious balance” between our demand for oil, protection of the environment and keeping the salt of the earth workers in the same industry as their grandfathers and their grandfathers before them. We are living in the pass and living a lie because it makes us feel better and keeps us from confronting a hard reality that’s going to demand hard choices. And we’re going to keep this going until we can’t.
The miners and the drillers aren’t holding our energy policy hostage, their employers are. And their employers are using job extortion on public officials to do it.
That said, creating an entitlement program to transition these folks to new jobs and shutting the mines down makes sense only if we are willing to have a massive program of installing third- and fourth-generation package nuclear plants.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m not sure that we will ever reach “until we can’t”. We are likely to see a society that endures the harsh consequences thinking them random acts of nature instead of the failure of policy.