Henry Waxman has been My Man ever since the Acid Rain Wars of the 1980s. He has been quietly but forcefully reconfiguring the House Energy and Commerce Committee to achieve an optimum environmental effect with the critical energy and climate change legislation that will be forthcoming this year. In an article from ClimateWire in yesterday’s “NYT” about the present shape and trajectory of the legislation, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would “package energy and global warming measures together into one large bill.” According to the article, it was Chairman Waxman who first convinced Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, the powers that be in the House, of the one bill approach, and then the lobbying effort moved over to the Senate. Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations committee and a very strong advocate for a robust cap-and-trade regime, has also embraced the idea. Remember also that Waxman’s former chief of staff, Phil Schiliro, is Obama’s Director of Legislative Affairs, so you would have to take a wild guess and figure that this has been walked through the White House.
This is all a big, big undertaking but the momentum is enormous. And indeed the heavens themselves may be in proper alignment. It may not yet be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but things are looking up.
Meanwhile, back in New York, the “NYT” reports today that Governor David Paterson has overruled his Department of Environmental Conservation (my old employer) and it appears, not incidentally, his Deputy Secretary for the Environment, Judi Enck, in allowing greater GHG emissions from power plants than had been previously agreed, both in state regulations and under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. (See under RGGI here.) This is a victory for the Independent Power Producers of New York and Gavin Donohue, their chief executive. Donohue was the top political (Republican flavor) operative at DEC in the late 1990s. He’s not someone who’s afraid to try to get what he wants. Environmentalists are livid. The article says the environmental community is “… also criticizing what they see as a secret process with an industry that has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Governor Paterson’s campaign coffers.”
David Paterson has disappointed a lot of people in the last several months. Add me to the list.
(Update: Paterson’s office now says they haven’t made any decisions. See this from “Crain’s NY Business.”)
Here’s a real whopper though: Two Presidential appointments of world-class scientists, warmly welcomed by the relevant Senate committees, are “on hold” because one Senator, Bob Menendez, doesn’t like the smell of Obama’s policy on Cuba. Progress on confronting the climate change crisis is being held hostage to the most parochial of politics. John Holdren will, eventually, lead the White House Office of Science and Technology and Jane Lubchenco will head up NOAA, two critical posts, and these two folks are both head of the class, 100% blue chip. (See Obama’s Team, Continued here.)
The “Washington Post” said here that the delay “…has alarmed environmentalists and scientific experts who strongly back Holdren and Lubchenco.” The Wonk Room has also weighed in on this, saying here that Menendez is blocking them simply to gain leverage on his Cuba beef. The Wonk Room has links to other commentary, notably from Kate Sheppard at Gristmill and Chris Mooney at The Intersection.
If you thought the filibuster was an antidemocratic and archaic mechanism, how about the Senatorial “privilege” of a hold! One Senator can thwart the will of 99 others on some matters.
But then the Senate itself, when you get right down to it, is antidemocratic in just the fact that it exists as it does. Think about it: the Senators from Rhode Island and Wyoming have as much juice as the Senators from California and New York. One man, one vote? In a review of How Democratic Is the American Constitution? by Robert A. Dahl, the eminent historian Gordon Wood wrote of the Framers: “The most egregious of their mistakes (apart from their failure to abolish slavery, of course) involved their acceptance of political inequality, most notably in the equal representation of the states in the Senate and in the use of electors in the election of the president. Whatever justification there was for the so-called ‘Connecticut Compromise’ at the convention, which entitled each state to two senators, it has led, says Dahl, to ‘a profound violation of the democratic idea of political equality among all citizens.'” (See the May 9, 2002 “NY Review of Books” – Rambunctious American Democracy.)
