If the Democrats dump cap-and-trade, it would be no surprise. The bill seemed doomed the minute it left the house – it has been sitting on the sidelines for months. Now it appears no action will be taken throughout 2010 given the struggling economy and the beating the Democrats have taken publicly over health care.
Bruised by the health care debate and worried about what 2010 will bring, moderate Senate Democrats are urging the White House to give up now on any effort to pass a cap-and-trade bill next year.
“I am communicating that in every way I know how,” says Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of at least half a dozen Democrats who’ve told the White House or their own leaders that it’s time to jettison the centerpiece of their party’s plan to curb global warming. …
“We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming, but I think it’s very difficult in the kind of economic circumstances we have right now,” said Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, who called passage of any economy-wide cap and trade “unlikely.” …
The writing on the wall was Copenhagen. Obama left with a “non-binding agreement,” and the environmental crowd has been crowing every since. There’s also other matters to tend to, like election.
Energy costs are multipliers in the distribution chain, and price hikes would cause prices to escalate rapidly on almost every product for sale in the US. We would have runaway inflation at the same time we would have either negative or anemic growth, hardly a combination that wins elections for the party in power. And that doesn’t take into account the regional electoral issues in states that rely on coal for their economies — states like Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Ohio, who have Democrats representing them in the Senate … for now.
Morrissey doesn’t count out Pelosi and Reid eventually buying the legislation through, especially given the success their use of graft has had at moving along the health care bill.
Print
Digg
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Facebook
Yahoo! Buzz
Twitter
Google Bookmarks
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
MSN Reporter
MySpace
Orkut
Ping.fm
Reddit
RSS
Slashdot
Technorati
Tumblr
Webnews.de
It’s almost like the only point of the whole exercise was to give the Blue Puppies’ opponents soundbits and campaign ad material for use this upcoming October.
Stephen Green had his “best blog bits of the week.” He featured a post from a prominent liberal blogger (I can’t remember who), that lamented the Republicans ability to pass whatever they want with 50 votes while the Democrats can’t pass anything with 60. The reason? People actually liked the Republican legislation, they don’t like the Democratic legislation.
Yeah,these Blue Lap Dogs are fixing to get a cap busted on them…they wait until their missy Nancy Lugosi has enough votes,then they all vote nay.The top dog,John Tanner here in Tennessee,just declined to run for reelection…the stress of hypocrisy was too much for him,I suppose.