Climate Change Legislation: A Case Study in the Legislative Process

Quote from Neo Tocqueville :

• Is this the legislative process that we want?
• If not, can Tea Party-type movements really change this when, 80%+ of the members of Congress will always be re-elected (if all the Tea-Party backed senators are elected, they'll still be less than 10% of the senate)?
• If not, can a third-party President really change this when everything has to originate in the Congress?
• If not, are we totally effed?

Quote from Neo Tocqueville :

As the World Burns: How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change. [newyorker.com]

by Ryan Lizza

[Olympia Snowe] also made it clear that granting her wishes—everything from exempting home heating oil from greenhouse-gas regulations and permanently protecting Georges Bank, a Maine fishery, from drilling—would not guarantee her support. She had used similar tactics to win concessions in Obama’s health-care bill, which she eventually voted against.


That day, Kerry had something specific to offer [to Tom Donohue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce]: preemption from carbon being regulated by the E.P.A. under the Clean Air Act, with few strings attached. Kerry asked Donohue if that was enough to get the Chamber to the table. “We’ll start working with you guys right now,” Donohue said. It was a promising beginning. Soon afterward, Rosengarten and two of Donohue’s lobbyists worked out the legislative text on preemption. The Chamber was allowed to write the language of its top ask into the bill.


[To get his support] Kerry walked [T. Boone] Pickens through the components of the bill that he and his colleagues were writing, but Pickens seemed uninterested. He had just one request: include in the climate legislation parts of a bill that Pickens had written, called the Natural Gas Act, a series of tax incentives to encourage the use of natural-gas vehicles and the installation of natural-gas fuelling stations. In exchange, Pickens would publicly endorse the bill.


Kerry told his colleagues at the March meeting, “Shell, B.P., and Conoco are going to need to silence the rest of the industry.” The deal was specific. The ceasefire would last from the day of the bill’s introduction until the E.P.A. released its economic analysis of the legislation, approximately six weeks later. Afterward, the industry could say whatever it wanted. “This was the grand bargain that we struck with the refiners,” one of the people involved said. “We would work with them to engineer this separate mechanism in exchange for the American Petroleum Institute being quiet. They would not run ads, they would not lobby members of Congress, and they would not refer to our bill as a carbon tax.” At another meeting, the three senators and the heads of the three oil companies discussed a phrase they could all use to market the policy: a “fee on polluters.”


Graham asked Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, to write the drilling language.


Blanche Lincoln, of Arkansas, told Lieberman that she had a major oil refiner in her state—Murphy Oil—and she wanted to make sure that any cap-and-trade bill protected it.


After the Fox News leak, a rumor had circulated that Congress wouldn’t pass a highway bill because of the Lindsey Graham gas-tax hike; Graham had to appease truckers in South Carolina. Now he insisted on eight billion dollars for the Highway Trust Fund, saying it was his price for staying. ... “Senator, please, just give me five minutes,” Rosengarten told Graham. “I’ll find your eight billion!” She and another Lieberman aide retrieved a spreadsheet they used to track all the spending and revenues in the bill. They fiddled with some numbers and—presto!—Graham had his money. (Later that day, Lieberman figured that, if they were going to spend eight billion dollars on highways, he might as well get some credit, too. He called the American Trucking Association to tell its officials the good news. They responded that they wanted twice that amount.)


There was just one more deal to make. The Edison Electric Institute represents the biggest electric utilities, and its president, Thomas Kuhn, was another grandee in Republican circles. The E.E.I. already had almost everything it wanted: preëmption, nuclear loan guarantees, an assurance that the cost of carbon would never rise above a certain level, and billions of dollars’ worth of free allowances through 2030 to help smooth the transition into the program. Now the E.E.I. had two new requests: it wanted a billion dollars more in free allowances, and it wanted the start date of the cap-and-trade regime pushed back from 2012 to 2015. Within minutes, the senators had agreed to almost everything that Kuhn and his lobbyists were asking for.


The E.E.I. wanted even more if utilities were to be the only guinea pigs for cap-and-trade. This time, the electric companies demanded regulatory relief from non-greenhouse-gas emissions, like mercury and other poisons, as well as more free allowances. Kerry refused to discuss those pollutants, but, in what was probably the nadir of the twenty-month effort, he responded, “Well, what if we gave you more time to comply and decreased the rigor of the reduction targets?” The cap was supposed to be sacrosanct, but Kerry had put it on the table. As a participant said afterward, “The poster child of this bill is its seventeen-per-cent-reduction target. It’s the President’s position in Copenhagen. It’s equal to the House bill.” Now Kerry was saying they could go lower.

• Is this the legislative process that we want?
  
• If not, can Tea Party-type movements really change this when, 80%+ of the members of Congress will always be re-elected (if all the Tea-Party backed senators are elected, they'll still be less than 10% of the senate)?
  
• If not, can a third-party President really change this when everything has to originate in the Congress?
  
• If not, are we totally effed?