Bringing 'round the House

We watch dozens of hours of climate bill debate so you don’t have to 1

I’m keeping close watch over debate on the Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. (Grist ... sitting through hours upon hours of markup so you don’t have to!)

We’ll spare you the blow-by-blow and just give you the scoop when there’s big news. But the true political junkies waiting at the edge of their seats for news can tune in to my Twitter feed or our collective climate-bill feed for up-to-the minute information.

The short story: Debate on the bill is trudging onward very, very slowly. Democrats have passed a flurry of minor amendments—nothing too exciting. And though Republicans have offered a number of amendments meant to weaken the legislation, they’ve had very little success, with only one amendment passing so far.

Undeterred, Republicans still intend to offer more than 400 amendments to drag out debate on the bill as long as possible. On both Tuesday and Wednesday, debate lasted late into the night. If they can’t kill the bill, they’re going to try to kill us by boredom in the process.

To stave off the tedium, I’ve been keeping an eye on the League of Conservation Voters’ new blog that tracks the wacky things climate skeptics are saying on the Hill.

Speaking of, here’s video of Smokey Joe Barton (R-Texas), the king of Republican deniers, discussing the climate bill on C-SPAN Tuesday. Money quote: “Something that the Democrat sponsors do not point out, a lot of the CO2 that is created in the United States is naturally created. You can’t regulate God. Not even the Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress can regulate God.”

Kate Sheppard is Grist’s political reporter.

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  1. craig78 Posted 9:16 am
    21 May 2009

    Smokey Joe and the GOP go toe to toe with....carbon dioxide.  Don't they understand how these remarks will one day come back to haunt them and their party? Don't Joe Barton, John Boehner, James Inhofe, and all the other GOP leaders understand this is not a typical political debate? Climate change is not health care, social security, or tax policy.  To give an example, the majority of Americans believe that New Deal legislation staved off the worst effects of the Great Depression.  Many staunch conservatives, nevertheless, have launched a revisionist movement, sparked by the historian Amity Shales, to claim that Roosevelt era legislation actually prolonged the depression.  They can make this claim without getting laughed out of the room because determining the effects of tax code changes on median incomes is not cut or dry.  Likewise, if Dems pass major health care reform this year, the opposition will always be able to claim that the reforms were damaging to the US economy or individual consumers.
    But floods, hurricanes, and droughts don't have the same ambiguity.  Fifteen or twenty years from now, the debate will be long over.  Carbon dioxide will have triumphed.  Even with very agressive legislation, which the Waxman-Markey bill is not, even with global collective action on the same scale, even if all this happened immediately, from what I read, we are going to face significant impacts from climate change.
    The lesson for Smokey Joe and his minions:  Don't turn a scientific debate into a political one.  You'll end up looking like a damn fool.  And possibly lose your party as well.

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