Ryan Lizza’s latest piece in The New Yorker is about how climate change legislation failed in the Senate, but it’s also about how you pass a big, contentious bill in the Senate. And the way you do that is largely to placate powerful business groups so that they won’t wage holy jihad against your efforts. One of the more enlightening things (at least, for me) about Lizza’s article is that the polluting industry was, pretty much across the board, willing to cut a deal that would include meeting the 17% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. They wanted to eviscerate the Waxman-Markey House version of the bill, but they were all basically bought off during the negotiations over the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill. And the K-L-G version of the bill was on course to win the support or neutrality of even the Chamber of Commerce. What killed the bill was a combination of bad luck, competing priorities, sloppy coordination, and (most importantly) an increasingly toxic environment caused by the Party of No strategy of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Koch Brother-financed Tea Party movement.
The main problem that Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham faced was not that they couldn’t strike a deal with the polluters that the environmental movement could support. The main problem was that the couldn’t convince any Republicans to join in in the effort. Under ordinary circumstances, if the Chamber of Commerce said it was a bill they could support, a few Republicans would feel free to support the bill. If Big Coal and Big Oil said they weren’t going to lobby against it, that would give members a free hand. But, the strategy of denying Obama any legislative victories, combined with the carefully cultivated Cult of Climate Change Denial strategy of the Koch Brothers was enough to get the base of the Republican Party riled up into an insensate froth. Any Republican who even hinted that they might cooperate with Obama was treated to abuse:
The next day, Graham was holding a town-hall meeting in the gym of a high school in Greenville, South Carolina. His constituents were not happy. One man accused him of “making a pact with the Devil.” Another shouted, “No principled compromise!” One audience member asked, “Why do you think it’s necessary to get in bed with people like John Kerry?” Graham, dressed in a blue blazer and khakis, paced the floor, explaining that there were only forty Republicans in the Senate, which meant that he had to work with the sixty Democrats. A man in the bleachers shouted, “You’re a traitor, Mr. Graham! You’ve betrayed this nation and you’ve betrayed this state!”
Soon afterward, Graham called Lieberman. He was concerned that Kerry might drag him too far to the left, and he knew that Lieberman, a close friend with whom he had travelled during McCain’s Presidential campaign, could serve as a moderating force.
This should be a sobering lesson for progressives. Remember that the only reason this bill was being pushed by Kerry and Lieberman was because the chairperson of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, Barbara Boxer, doesn’t have the friendships or legislative chops to move a contentious bill in the Senate. To be honest, Kerry doesn’t either, which is why Lieberman became central to the deal-making.
Much of Lizza’s piece focuses on the sad spectacle of Kerry, Lieberman, and the White House making one pathetic capitulation after another in an effort to pass a bill that could reduce carbon emissions by the targeted 17% by 2020. There’s the offshore drilling, and the subsidies for T. Boone Pickens, and subsidies to the nuclear industry, and much more. There’s the gymnastics they went through to craft a cap and trade bill that couldn’t be called a ‘gas tax.’ And all of it is really aimed at avoiding the kind of media frenzy that killed ACORN and the effort to close Guantanamo, and that surrounds the PARK51 mosque. Simply put, if the right-wing wants to kill something, they have the media resources to get it done.
I saw that Benen, Klein, and Yglesias recently debated whether this is a center-right nation. Well, I’m here to tell you that it sure as hell is a center-right nation. It’s not just the Senate rules, or the cost of campaigning that makes it so. It’s also the ability of the right to create hysteria whenever they want to. It’s a miracle that health care reform passed.