The Politics of Lieberman-Warner

by William Yeatman on June 9, 2008

A fellow anti-Lieberman-Warner advocate emails:

Here is a good theme to hammer home: the 2003 vote was 43-55, and if you take post vote statements, final passage on the Boxer bill would have been 44-56.  That is after billions of dollars and an award winning movie.

Their cash-to-success ratio is worse than the Rudy 08 campaign.

Yes, 44 votes in favor of the bill, according to a tally of rhetorical turf staked out by The 100. And even that figure is suspect given that it includes some among the sixteen senators who couldn't quite find their way to the floor in order to wed themselves to a vote on cap-and-trade.

As former Idaho Sen. Steve Symms used to say, when it comes to environmental issues in the world's greatest deliberative body, "Profiles in Courage" would be, at best, of pamphlet length.

So we have now reaffirmed the obvious lack of desire to be associated with any specifics of the agenda disingenuously keened over in the Senate as addressing the greatest threat to mankind. This took on its two most cynical forms on Friday, of a) voting to move the bill forward, giving the patina of support, which was revoked by nine of the 48 "yea" voters in a letter to Sen. Harry Reid stating that in fact they don't and wouldn't support the measure (talk about trying to have it both ways), and b) the aforementioned sixteen senators, including the two presumptive nominees for the presidency, deciding they had other things more important to do than vote on something for which they, too, loudly tout their (purely rhetorical) support.

In the face of actions belying proclaimed support it sure seems to me that Sen. McConnell and the gang should offer up Lieberman-Warner as often as possible in the next few months, to kill the bill dead by revealing the emptiness of the claims to majority support, etc. This would ensure it does not reemerge any time in the near future.

And the future is now. Beginning today Sen. Reid plans to bring his energy (tax) bill to the floor this week, and I can think of no better place to start this campaign. Further, Reid has declared that — now that global warming is out of the way, chuckle — he is going to spend the remaining days as previewing for voters what the majority would do if only they had larger numbers.

It is pretty clear that reviving Lieberman-Warner's rationing scheme is on that list, once its champions figure out how to further disguise its obvious pain. So, Republicans and others opposed to Lieberman-Warner energy rationing, why not help the majority out in their effort to show people what is on the menu next year, by offering that bill as an amendment to anything and everything you can? As I write today in Human Events, it is time to win.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: