Taking Our Ball and Going Home

In the first week of November, it was not just bipartisanship but basic, honest debate that took a hit in the U.S. Senate.  We’re trying to restore some sanity — and adult behavior — on the Hill.

The minority members of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, seeing that the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Bill was likely to pass successfully out of committee, decided en masse to boycott the planned mark-up session.  As a reminder, this bill, S1733, is the Senate’s version of the energy/climate bill that passed the House in the Spring.  And despite its weaknesses, it represents the one chance the country has this year of passing legislation vital to the growth of clean energy and the control of climate change.

Notwithstanding this unprecedented show of petulance, Committee Chair Barbara Boxer passed the bill out of committee, but the action of the minority, led by Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, will make it that much more difficult to get the votes needed when the bill reaches the floor of the Senate.

Members of Congress are, of course, entitled to voice their disagreement with each other, and to vote against a bill with which they find fault.  But the minority’s actions, when closely analyzed, look like transparent attempts to derail this country’s first serious attempt to confront far-reaching energy and climate issues.

In a nutshell, Inhofe and his colleagues are demanding that the EPA carry out some five weeks’ worth of analysis on the bill.  But the differences between this and the House bill, according to the EPA, are so small that they wouldn’t even show up on the computer modeling routine;  the latter bill (“Waxman-Markey”) was subjected to a full analysis when it was in debate earlier this year.  Besides, drafts of the Senate bill (“Kerry-Boxer”) had been available for since late September, during which time the minority members made no attempt to request such analysis.   Senator Boxer even delayed submitting the legislation for over a day to bring in EPA Associate Administrator David McIntosh to answer committee members’ questions, but minority party senators declined to make an appearance to ask them.

And since these senators have rejected Senate Majority Leader Reid’s promise of a full five-week EPA analysis before floor debate, one has to question the amount of good faith being shown by them.

For more detail of this sorry process, see this November 4 article in Climate Progress and another in the same day’s Washington Post.

If the minority party senators on the E & PW committee have abandoned honest debate and resorted to schoolyard “I’m-taking-my-ball-and-going-home” tactics, and for reasons that don’t stand up to the barest examination, their commitment to what’s best for our future — as opposed to political point-scoring — simply has to be questioned.  This country has too much at stake to allow them to game the system for purposes that are detrimental to our future.

Would you like to tell your own senators how you feel about that?

You can go here to take action and communicate with your senators — right now.