Graham pulls support for the tri-partisan climate bill because Reid puts immigration reform in front:
Graham (R-SC) charged that Obama and Senate leaders have signaled immigration is their priority. Graham said that “has destroyed my confidence that there will be a serious commitment and focus to move energy legislation this year.”
“All of the key players, particularly the Senate leadership, have to want this debate as much as we do. This is clearly not the case,” Graham wrote in in the letter, obtained by TPMDC and included below.
Immigration is taking precedence right now because of a.) the Arizona law, and b.) Obama, Reid et al (correctly) perceive that overall it's a political winner for Dems, potentially blunting the impact of what could be an ugly November. Graham knows this, and considering how much he's stuck out his neck being identified with the bill, I'm not surprised he's drawn the line.
This is a bad development for climate change …. and for the world. There is nothing more important than addressing climate change: With all respect, not immigration, not health care … frankly not even the economy. I know it's against the political CW to say so, but it happens to be true.
I'm hoping that the Senate can indeed handle both issues this year. I'm not all that confident.
I know Obama likes big legislation, and as hard as it is to move anything there’s an inclination to go big.
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p>But, one way to deal with both is to nibble. Come up with a smaller climate package as a setup for 2011-2012, and the same for immigration. Pass ’em now. Acknowledge that there isn’t the time or energy for big legislation between now and November, but we could make things a little better now and promise to get back to them. For climate change, that means a package that (a) vamps up coal safety, (b) adds a bit of enviro protection to coal areas, (c) puts money into electrical grid, (d) puts money into weatherizing homes, (e) ratchets up building standards nationwide, (f) puts money into mass transit, or some combination. How to pay for it? Dunno — I personally like the gas tax, but that’s probably a non-starter. Taxing carbon doesn’t happen in a “nibble” bill. As for immigration nibbles… dunno. Not my department.
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p>Sure, you’re going to rile up the teabaggers on both issues. So what? They’re already in full battle mode anyway. Might as well throw some red meat to major constituencies of the Democrats while doing (a bit of) the right thing.
What makes you think Democrats are going to be able to get anything at all done in 2011-12?
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p>Harry Reid is stupid to go with immigration first. He had a Republican ready to overcome a filibuster on climate change, and the House has already passed a bill. Climate change is definitely an issue where a bill could’ve made it through the Senate. Immigration isn’t. And now in hopes of getting immigration reform through he’s killed climate change’s opportunity. If Reid had kept his mouth shut on immigration and focused on climate change, he could’ve come back to immigration later.
I just don’t think that the House bill has a prayer in the Senate — you’ve got 41 senators minus some combination of (Graham, Collins, Snowe, Brown) against, right off the bat. But wait: let’s look at states with Dem senators where this is tough: Alaska, Montana, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois just to start. Now I’m not arguing that all of those Dem senators are against, just like I’m not arguing that Graham–Brown are all for.
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p>The fact is, it’s a tough fight, it’s confusing stuff, and it’s easy for the GOP to cry out about rising energy prices and the Dems are making it worse in the short term, which wouldn’t likely be incorrect. It’s a tough bill to get through in the best of times, and this ain’t the best of times. Plus, there isn’t likely enough time to get it through before midterms.
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p>A nibble, on the other hand, would be passable now, which is sooner rather than later.
if anything, passing a climate bill would be harder, especially one that actually seeks to improve the environment.
There’s no reason to nibble on immigration. We have the numbers to pass it, so long as we hold the Democratic line. I’m confident in our ability to at least get a few Republicans to not filibuster. They’re too friendly to their corporate allies and this will help those corporate allies, plus this Arizona law will be brutal for national Republicans and I’m sure some of them would be happy to see it go away.
The polling on this has long been tricky. But a lot to suggest that it’s a loser.
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p>Example:
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p>Arizona. McCain beat Obama 54 to 45.
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p>This new law? 70 to 23 favor it.
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p>What saved Obama from this issue in the election was he and McCain share roughly the same position.
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p>Not this time.
70-23 of Arizona folks favor it according to your unsourced poll.
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p>But…
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p>What’s the breakdown of Democratic or Democratic leaning registered/likely voters on the issue? What’s the breakdown of the moderates?
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p>How would that impact the race in AZ (where the Dems have little hope at the senate seat; I haven’t seen detailed analysis of the 8 house seats)? How would it impact governor, senate, and house seats in California? Texas? New Mexico? Florida? North Carolina? New York? That too matters, probably much more than merely Arizona.
i was just asking charley for the evidence on why he thinks it’s a political winner.
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p>i do a tiny bit of research to show the “plausible” case that it’s the reverse, and now you want me to go whole hog. no fair good sir.
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p>i withdraw my analysis and simply ask charley: why do u think immigration is a winner?
I don’t think it’s not either — I have no idea. I’m not much of an amateur expert on immigration. I know that the Hispanic population is generally in favor of liberalizing the policy, and that they’re growing and have the potential to be solid Democratic voters for a generation. I know that European decent Americans tend to prefer restrictive immigration policy.
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p>What I don’t know (nor will study) is where those people live w.r.t. vulnerable House and Senate seats.
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p>That’s all I’m suggesting… that a simple AZ 70-23 isn’t anywhere near enough to understand strategy on immigration.
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p>That’s election stuff. As to what I think is the right thing to do, that’s another story altogether. Personally, I’d start with significant jail time for both owners and managers and HR people who hire illegal workers. It’s not worth sitting in jail for a year to save a few bucks an hour on an employee. Will this mean higher prices for food, house cleaning, landscaping, and child care? Youbetcha. Will it mean lower profits for the small businesses which do food supply, cleaning, and landscaping? Indeed it will.
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p>In the mean time, I do support a clear path to citizenship for people who are already here, which mirrors much of what has been proposed. My caveat: I don’t believe in this “English only” stuff. I think it’s wise to know English in this country, but it’s neither essential nor required of US citizens, so I see no reason to force it.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
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p>Not only is it broadly popular across the population, but it is the key issue in one of our biggest constituencies in the party now, and only promises to become even more important in the future. Turn off them today and we lose support and volunteers, as well as risk losing them in the future.
Sure, lots of people want immigration reform.
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p>My reform calls for a crackdown on employment and a clear path to citizenship. My father’s reform calls for implementing the recent Arizona program nationwide.
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p>They’re both reform.
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p>The support for any particular reform is much, much lower than the dkos numbers — much as we have learned from health care. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, and it’s not at all clear if the Dems will win in the ballot boxes in Nov 2010 with a reform similar to what Kennedy et al were proposing not too long ago.
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p>It’s also why I think a nibble works. You make progress and you make people’s lives better. Not optimally better, but better. You also show a commitment. Same goes for gay rights. We’re not going to get the repeal of DOMA, national hate crimes, discrimination protection, federal marriage rights, adoption rights, and so forth all at once — so lets get something now, ie the repeal of DADT. Do that, and it helps the Dems get votes and money from the GLBT and friends community — while making their lives better. Not optimally better, but better. Do nothing, and you risk apathy from that group… and rightly so.
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p>Survive and advance. Take a nibble. Make progress. Then, come back in 2011 and make more progress. You allow a narrative that the Democrats are able to get things done despite GOP opposition. You give Obama a broader portfolio in 2012. You allow each Senator and House to appeal to broader groups of people, because they’ve got a large number of feathers in their cap, not just one or two really big ones.
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p>What we have here on immigration is a pretty specific poll which is more popular than the generic “do you support immigration reform” question. Contrary to what you’ve said, I think when people hear the floated proposals, it becomes more popular, not less.
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p>BTW: The “support” for health care wasn’t “lower” than the “dkos numbers,” insofar as you can call the credible polls they report or fund “dkos numbers.” Dkos tracked health care through its popular faze, it’s unpopular faze, and post-bill (at which point its become fairly popular again, according to non-Ras polling). I don’t think their numbers were higher or lower than numbers reported elsewhere (again, aside from Ras, which has been bitten by the teabagger bug).
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p>And, of course, the only real reason why health care reform ever became unpopular to begin with is because the Democrats let the process drag out so long. Anything, under those circumstances, will almost certainly become unpopular until it’s resolved. There’s too many openings for people to lie about the issue and people just plain, old get sick of hearing about it.
I hadn’t seen the numbers that high for that precise a question.
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p>Will those numbers hold up when there’s an actual proposal, complete with specifics? Dunno. I suspect we’d get the same results as the health care debate… start losing people for all sorts of particular and peculiar reasons.
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p>Which is why, as you point out, if they’re going to do it they’ve got to do it quickly.
After stopping and stalling on everything from health-insurance reform to financial reregulation to hundreds of administrative appointments (to climate change), none of these bozos has a leg to stand on claiming that urgent business is being preempted by politics.
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p>Graham may (though I doubt it) have “stuck his neck out” on this bill, winning (in the Republican sense of “winning”) some crippling, polar-bear-killing concessions in the process, but there is no sense in which Reid’s handling of the Senate calendar makes his climate-bill position any riskier for Graham.
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p>In any case, if Graham wants to influence the Senate schedule, he should cause his party to run Senate candidates that favor things that Americans actually want, thereby winning control of the Senate. Where once in a while the majority rules.
than you seem to. Maybe I’m being taken by his long term plot, but Graham has signaled an interest on working on this for a few years now, much to my surprise throughout that time. I’m not suggesting that he’d go along with what stomv wants, but neither would Lieberman, and neither would a number of Democratic senators from states like WV, PA, AK, LA, MT, etc.
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p>The fact is, on energy, the Democrats are far from unified due to the large variations in minerals and resources from state to state. That’s part of the reason why I think nibbles might work — the majority want each little thing but the minority is against it with more gusto. So, you can pick ’em off one at a time, but you can’t bundle them.
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p>In terms of electricity, simply raising the cost of coal by driving up safety standards and environmental standards would help drive a shift to natural gas and renewables. Sure it wouldn’t be a massive shift, but lots of nibbles would get it done — and that’s one of ’em.
for the abysmal failures of my party. I just don’t think that someone who says, “I’m taking my ball and going home ’cause somebody did something mean about something else” is any kind of climate-change hero.
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p>I also think that if this sort of opportunistic grandstanding were met with firmness rather than appeasement, we would soon have a lot less opportunistic grandstanding. But that is a separate point and debatable.
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p>Nibble away, I’m for it.
Public statements on the matter he tried to contact Reid numerous times at the end of last week to ensure that Climate was still scheduled and they (Kerry, Lieberman and Graham) would be able to go forward with their Monday announcement.
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p>He was met with silence then with the word that immigration was taking priority.
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p>He is rightly upset at having the work that he and Kerry and Leiberman had done over many months thrown aside for a bill that isn’t even drafted yet.
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p>There is no wonder why he pulled his support. He feels that he worked in good faith only to have the proverbial rug pulled out from under him.
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p>I don’t blame Graham, Kerry or Leiberman, they worked to reach a bill that they could all work with and presumably move towards an up or down vote. While I may quibble with some of the components of the bill, I cannot complain with the way they all worked together as a team.
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p>The change in priorities reeks of political opportunism for Reid and his re-election chances. If that is the case, shame on him for putting a very important piece of legislation at risk for his own personal campaign.
Check out what’s been uncovered over at Greg Sargent, via dkos:
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p>Why, just last month, Graham said:
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p>So look, both are important, and frankly there’s no reason why the Senate can’t work on two things at the same time. Graham complained when immigration wasn’t moving along, and now he’s complaining that it is moving along. Just because Graham isn’t acting like a total ass doesn’t mean he’s being rational or reasonable. His party is in the minority. Graham has signaled a genuine interest in shaping policy from the minority position instead of sticking his fingers in his ears. Until now that is.
Immigration is important too.
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p>I agree with Charley that climate change legislation is A-1 because if we screw it up, we’ve screwed it up for future generations, whereas with other issues we’re only screwing it up for ourselves; future generations won’t suffer directly because we didn’t get immigration policy right in 2010 quite like future generations could stuffer because of climate change.
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p>Still, there are plenty of folks for whom immigration policy is a more urgent matter, including oodles of Democrats and Democratic legislators.
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p>And frankly, there isn’t a single GOP Senator I would consider trustworthy when commenting on a Democratic politician, particularly those who the GOP loves to demonize: Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Kerry, Kennedy, Clinton, Gore, Daschle, etc. Note that all of those have had major leadership positions, with the exception of Barney Frank who’s merely a fag jew from Taxachusetts (and left-handed too!).* The GOP has been overtly character-assassinating Democratic leaders for a long time now. I simply don’t believe Graham’s comments on Harry Reid.
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p> * To my knowledge, the GOP has taken a pass on badmouthing Senator Kennedy now that he’s passed on.
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p> ** If you’re new around here, you don’t know that these are not my words nor opinions. To be clear, they are not.
…take over the pushing for an energy bill? Can’t Congress as an institution, with its several committees and members, multitask? If you don’t do this first, I don’t want to do it at all sounds like a tantrum to me.
is in the minority, and therefore has little control over the Senate’s agenda.
By pulling out of the climate legislation this one Senator can and will set the agenda backward.
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p>That said the New Republic had a good post on why the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill is just a bug giveaway to corporations that won’t actually reduce carbon. The Maine twins have a cap and dividend approach that is much better from a public policy perspective, it falls short of a carbon tax but I think cap and dividend is easier to sell and would actually be a politically viable way to shove more regulation against polluters.
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p>Also in my view you cannot be serious about stopping climate change without a serious commitment to expanding nuclear energy in the US. Wind and solar are just not going to cut it if we want to completely replace coal, gas, and oil and soon.
Cap and trade is way better than carbon tax.
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p>Speaking as someone who earned a B.S. in economics:
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p>If the tax is perfectly priced, it has the exact same result as a carbon tax. Same amount of carbon, and same additional cost to the emitters. Perfectly priced, the carbon tax is identical.
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p>The problem is that the correct price for the tax would have to be continuously adjusted to ensure the right emissions. New massive oil field? Tax goes up. Huge breakthrough in PV? Tax goes down. 10% of the Toyota Priuses explode battery acid? Tax goes up. Building codes nationwide get stronger? Tax goes down. Economy booming? Tax goes up. Oil embargo? Tax goes down.
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p>The goal is not to raise revenue. The goal is to get us to 350 ppm. If that’s the goal, why not just use that as the metric? You start with deciding the total amount of carbon you want to allow (just like with the tax), and then instead of trying to figure out exactly what the tax should be, you simply auction off the allowances. This way, the most efficient users of carbon will keep on doing what they’re doing, and we get to 350 with the least amount given up. We don’t get to 380 and get frustrated because a GOP congress or POTUS won’t raise the tax. We don’t get to 320, a number unnecessarily low. With cap and trade, anything and everything happening in the market (see above) is automatically reflected in the market itself. The permits will ebb and flow to different emitters as the market dictates, at a price dictated by supply and demand of the carbon emitters.
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p>To be clear, I’d take a carbon tax over nothing, but my suspicion is that a carbon tax will (a) not be high enough to get to 350, and (b) face extreme opposition every time there’s a suggestion to raise the tax price in order to get close to 350 (see gas tax history). Cap and trade is more efficient, and more likely to get us what we actually want — 350. As an added bonus, you get the revenue up front, which then becomes available sooner to invest in things like mass transit, electricity grids, green jobs training, etc.
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p>[/rant]
And we all know what BS stands for, right?:) (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)
Anyone who spouts it either is completely ignorant or earns their living off the industry or its lobby.
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p>So anyone serious about spouting nuclear energy that isn’t getting a paycheck for it is seriously, seriously ignorant on the subject. No offense. There may be a place for nuclear energy, but it should be limited to things like submarines, aircraft carriers and current facilities. No more of them should be built, and the ones we have now should be slowly retired.
It gets over 80% of its energy from nuclear power and the only emissions that releases is good ole H20 vapor.
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p>Nuclear energy is only expensive in this country due to the ban and the fact that for 30 years there has been no free market incentive to focus on nuclear energy.
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p>There are safe and efficient ways of storing it, at Yucca for instance, or at communities that actually want the waste (and there are some that do). Also technology on converting plutonium and waste to energy is increasing at an exponential rate and would allow existing facilities to convert 50% of their waste into energy.
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p>The pebble based reactor is much safer than the old design of reactor and there has only been one meltdown in the history of nuclear energy, and that was due to gross incompetence on the part of the Russians, ours are much safer. Mines cave in all the time, power plants explode, oil fires and spills are common, I would argue fossil fuel as a whole has killed far more people and caused far more ecological disasters than nuclear energy.
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p>Again since spent fuel and artificially produced uranium can now be used to fuel nuclear reactors I do not see the uranium problem as a serious impediment.
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p>President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu agree with me, as do most Western countries, that nuclear energy is the easiest, cheapest, and most effective way of cutting our emissions significantly in the short term.
We need an immigration bill, we need a climate bill… it’s unhelpful to turn one cause against the other. Immigration, because of the Arizona law, should definitely be addressed now. Then we can get to climate change. If we get immigration done quickly — and I think we will — that can only build momentum for us not only going into November, but other Democratic priorities, too. The sooner that Democrats are fully confident in their ability to pass bills without Republican support, the better.
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p>(Besides, it may take a good November to have the numbers to pass a half-way good climate bill, as well as possibly convince enough Republicans that it would be a bad idea to go against us.)
Names, not assumptions.
We have overwhelming majorities (and may not next year); let’s grow a spine and do what it takes to do it OUR way!
Graham has in the very, very recent past. I can see at least one of the two senators from Maine going along with it. But, ultimately, the question isn’t whether any GOP Senators will support it, it’s will enough agree not to filibuster. Given that immigration reform would do wonders for their corporate sponsors, I think that likely — much more likely than GOPers agreeing not to filibuster climate change, which their corporate sponsors abhor and their base thinks is a conspiracy or something.
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p>Why are you so quick to try to tear down immigration reform? I’m not trying to tear down climate change reform. There’s no reason why, on god’s green earth, we can’t have both. As Christopher said, we have overwhelming majorities here. Instead of allowing ourselves to be divided and conquered here, we need to band together and get both issues done. A victory on one makes the other more likely to happen.
It seems that Obama is using the capital from health care to go full throttle on both. Politically, I would argue both are essential to maintaining our majorities. We need to give Latino’s a reason to come out and vote for Democrats in the same numbers they did in 06 and 08. Their turnout will literally will make or break Reid, Bennet, Boxer, and a whole host of Representatives, not to mention Obama’s victories in the Western states were due to the Latino vote. It’s essential.
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p>Climate change on the other hand is essential to driving up Perot style centrist independents, also crucial to victory. They were more lukewarm on healthcare and might be anti-immigration, but they are vital to climate change and acting on that shows them that they voted for an honest and effective government.
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p>Approval ratings go up when the President gets good things done, hence the GOP strategy of saying no to everything to sell the argument that he is ineffective (its not sinister its smart, its how we lame ducked Bush throughout his second term, but we don’t want their side to get away with it).
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p>Graham is going to be the crucial swing vote on both issues, McCain is sadly capriciously running hard to the right to win his primary (a stupid tactic as well since independents and Democrats can vote in AZ GOP primaries). One suspects Brown might come on board climate change alongside the Mainers, Brown will likely be anti-immigration, not so sure about the Mainers (I believe Snowe is pro-reform). When the party in power shows America it can govern, it gets to keep governing.