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Voting on Cap-and-Trade
Ezra Klein writes today about Nancy Pelosi and the politics of voting in the House of Representatives:
On June 26, Pelosi passed cap and trade out of the House. Many considered it a huge, unforced error. The Senate wouldn't consider the bill for many months, if it ever took it up at all. Health-care reform was in full swing. And Pelosi had just forced her most vulnerable members to take an incredibly difficult vote.
....Talking to congressional Democrats over these past few months, Pelosi's decision to push cap and trade came up in almost every conversation. Coaxing support from vulnerable members who hadn't yet forgiven the leadership for cap and trade had, according to some of these sources, become one of the biggest obstacles to health-care reform.
I confess that I never understood the problem that swing-district House members had with this. If I were a vulnerable congressman, I'd want this vote taken as far before the midterm elections as possible. If it turns out to be a risky and ultimately wasted vote because the Senate doesn't act, well, at least it was a risky vote 17 months before next November. That's an eternity. A vote in June is a lot less likely to be a salient campaign issue than, say, a vote in December or January.
In any case, as Ezra says, Pelosi's early vote now looks very smart: "It's virtually impossible to imagine the House passing cap and trade in the coming months, not after the exhausting health-care reform battle and not as the midterm election draws closer." The whole thing is now out of the way and largely forgotten unless the Senate passes a bill, and if that happens, at least House members will be voting next year on something real. It's a lot easier to talk yourself into taking a risk for a real accomplishment than it is merely to make a quixotic point.
Legislation
Can someone please explain the process of merging bills from the two chambers?
For example, if the Senate doesn't pass cap and trade this year, ( or I guess it goes by the Congress, so next year? ), does the House bill expire? If so, will the House have to put together a new bill and start from scratch? And what happens if the Dems lose seats in the midterms, will they need to find more votes?
And what makes two bills candidates for merging - do they start off with the same name/number, or any two bills can be merged in a conference? I assume the current plan is to merge Waxman-Markey with Kerry-Boxer?
Seventeen months
Unfortunately, negative ads routinely involve attacks for votes - or even comments - made years before the current election cycle. I suspect that, at least in the minds of always-running Congresspersons, seventeen months isn't near enough cover.
The dangers of driving left in a Center-Right nation.
Recent self-identification polling the last couple of years, is consistently showing that twice as many Americans identify themselves as Conservative rather than Liberal and self identified Conservatives are as numerous as self identified Moderate/Independents. So I consider Pelosi ramming as many left big government programs through as she has so far, as being political suicide. She may survive, being from a liberal district, but she is putting into play for 2010 at least 80 or more seats currently held by democrats. The fact she is so ideologically driven to do this while Unemployment has increased to 10.2% has most people in "fly-over" country not only baffled, but getting quite angry at the entire democrat party, and most of the angriest I see tend to be the very Independents either party needs to gain and keep majorities. At this rate, Pelosi could quite possibly become one of the most destructive Speakers to her own party in generations, making Newt look like a great Speaker in comparison....
But what do I know, I'm a libertarian-conservative and think Cap-N-Tax Carbon programs are
A: Not needed as CO2 has not been PROVEN to increase warming as much as the computer models show, and
B: The economic attenuation to the US GDP will manifest in hundreds of thousands or even millions of jobs being lost to overseas countries that don't tax CO2 emissions. -- and
C: The very people who want the Cap-N-Tax programs the most, refuse to show any true seriousness on the subject, as they refuse to consider Nuclear Energy as a alternative to Coal-fired plants. So just why should any technically well-informed person take anything they say seriously?