Greens Flip: Senate Cap-and-Trade Bill ‘Not a Serious Proposal’

by Christopher C. Horner

This story in E&EM News PM (subscription required), “Murkowski floats plan to force Senate vote on cap and trade next week”, is spectacular.

boxer_kerry

Here are the money lines, all noting Sen. Murkowski’s clever plan to simply call the Left on their rhetoric and posing about the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill S. 1733, a bill that was marked up in the Environment and Public Works Committee in a somber yet urgent November affair, reporting it to the Senate floor and, oh yes, the Copenhagen conference:

“‘Boxer-Kerry is a non-starter, and the amendment — if that’s what it said — it would expose that,’ said Murkowski spokesman Robert Dillon. ‘We obviously don’t want to pass the bill; we’re confident that it would fail.’ Holding a vote on the Kerry-Boxer bill would ’show the sense of the Senate, where it is,’ Dillon said….

‘What she’s trying to do is force Democrats to vote against a bill that is clearly one that is not ripe to be brought to the Senate floor,’ said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, noting that the bill was intended to be combined with an energy bill aimed at lowering energy costs and spurring investments in technology.

‘This is Lisa Murkowski giving the finger to those who believe we need to reduce global warming pollution because this is not a serious proposal,’ Weiss said.”

Well, that’s not quite what it is, but it does reveal that someone was giving the rest of us the finger all along. And I am more than a little amused to note how the “us” includes not a few fellow travelers in Copenhagen.

Team Soros’s Dan Weiss calls the marked-up, EPW-approved Kerry-Boxer bill, rushed through to impress the Europeans with the Dems’ seriousness of purpose and courageous stance on the precipice of bicameral enactment, ”not a serious proposal.”

Gosh that’s great stuff. And quite a turnaround for our eager green beaver who, when peddling the pose, touted the bill as “another signal to the international community that the U.S. is serious about achievement of real reductions in its global warming pollution.” But, hey, being a green means never having to say you’re sorry. Just ask all of those Third World children who’ve paid the price for the agenda.

Still, no kidding. Nice you finally admit that when it looks like this bill — “marked up” in, and voted out of committee to the floor for quick packaging overseas — looks like it might be something your pals can have held against them in a meaningful way. Something about the prospect of a hanging and how it aids one’s thinking, etc. Or, maybe, it’s just that it’s rather easier to strike a silly pose for some Euro-love (still an epic fail, incidentally) than it is to confront your voters.

What poseurs! he is effectively admitting about a bill reported to the floor as well as publicly and we now know dishonestly hailed, if adding his own touch of absurdity: nothing added by other committees would unring the bell of cap-and-trade — the objective of which our president has admitted is to cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket” and “bankrupt” coal and dependent industries. So they’re reduced to some strange line of saying it’s painful but, you see, we were planning on adding some windmill and pixie dust “green jobs” nonsense to it and suddenly take away the pain (or, well , at least distract from what we’re really doing).

Second, recall and prepare to catalogue the promiscuous use of the line, in promotion of “must act now!” legislative pain, that “hey now…we don’t want EPA to do this!”. It does provide them a nice hard place against which to be pressed: possibly they might be forced to say “but I don’t want Congress to either!” (or they do want that but just not via the bill marked up in and voted out of committee and sold to the Europeans et al. as being really great shakes and almost there…)?

Great stuff. Really. And yet another wonderful exhibit about how seriously to take these people.


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Posted Jan 15th 2010 at 2:59 pm in Congress, Environment, News, Politics | 78 Comments