#ACES Wrap-up: Decoding the House Vote, Looking Ahead to the Senate

by Emily Gertz

categories: Clean Energy, Fossil Energy, Greenhouse Gas, Jobs & Economy, Policy & Legislation, Politics

Published June 29, 2009 @ 11:44AM PT

Above: Right-wing "hit list": the eight House Republicans who voted for the energy-climate bill.
Via Glenn Thrush on Politico (who asks, "Ever wonder why the GOP is losing moderates?" No.)

The White House did something pretty unusual Friday evening. It retracted President Obama's prepared weekend statement on health care reform, already being circulated, and replaced it with a new message exhorting the Senate to get climate/energy legislation passed as well.

Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times reported the move this way: "President Obama was planning to talk [in his regular weekend address] about the urgent need for Congress to begin coalescing around health care legislation, saying, 'If we don’t act, things will get worse.' But the urgency for health care suddenly turned out to be not so urgent after all."

I think Zeleny gets this wrong. Health care reform and curbing global warming are equally urgent -- and this White House knows it.

After years of inaction on these and other crises, it's like the nation has been in a slow-moving car crash. Now it's in the emergency room. The doctors and nurses have to decide: Which life-threatening injury is more important, the punctured lung or the cracked skull? There's no way to choose, so they surround the patient and try to fix them all at the same time. At least until one demands more attention than the others.

So, to overextend the analogy: The passage of the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate bill on Friday moved global warming up on the critical injury list.

So President Obama took advantage the opportunity to apply his own uniquely powerful form of pressure where it would do the most good.

It looks like a canny decision, since, according to The National Journal, how a district voted in the November election -- that is, pure political calculation -- meant the most to a Democratic representative's yea or nay on the bill:

Of the 49 House Democrats who represent districts that McCain carried last year, fully 29 voted against the measure. By contrast, just 15 of the 207 Democrats from districts that Obama carried last year voted against the bill. (Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings, whose district backed Obama, did not vote, meaning "Obama Democrats" ended up splitting 191-15.) Put another way, while 59 percent of the Democrats from districts that McCain carried voted no, just 7 percent of Democrats in Obama-majority districts opposed the White House on the vote.

Similarly, seven of the eight Republicans who supported the measure represent districts that backed Obama last November. (The list included Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, who's considering a bid for the president's former Senate seat, and Mike Castle of Delaware, who may run for the seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden.)

... [Of the Republican representatives,] 27 of the 34 Republicans from Obama-districts held with their party and voted against the legislation. [In California], only Mary Bono Mack from Palm Springs supported the bill. Meanwhile, Republicans from districts that McCain carried voted against the bill by 141-1, with Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey the only supporter. (Two other "McCain Republicans" did not vote.)

The degree of a district's reliance on coal-fired electricity also figured into how a representative voted, per the TNJ team. Of the 121 reps whose districts depend on coal for at least 40 percent of their energy, 30 voted against Waxman-Markey, "about one-in-four of the coal state Democrats ... compared to only a little over one-in-10 of everyone else."

Simply flipping that analyis offers up a more encouraging picture, though. As Brad Plumer at The New Republic writes:

It's actually noteworthy, though, to see how many coal-state Democrats voted for the bill. That's mostly because Henry Waxman and Rick Boucher bent over backward to make concessions for the coal industry—for instance, giving allowances away to local electric-distribution outfits so as to cushion the blow for ratepayers that get much of their power from burning coal. Environmental groups decried these measures, and there's certainly much to grumble about, but given that only a thimbleful of Republicans were going to vote for the bill, it's hard to see how any climate bill ever passes without concessions to coal-staters.

In the GOP minority, meanwhile, "27 of the 34 Republicans from Obama-districts held with their party and voted against the legislation," according to TNJ. [In California's eight GOP-held"Obama districts"], only Mary Bono Mack from Palm Springs supported the bill. Meanwhile, Republicans from districts that McCain carried voted against the bill by 141-1, with Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey the only supporter. (Two other "McCain Republicans" did not vote.)"

President Obama emphasized in his address how clean energy expansion would spur job growth -- echoing the statements of many of Waxman-Markey's supporters on Friday. Jobs jobs jobs is clearly the message he wants supporters to carry forward as the Senate takes up the bill.

During Friday's House debate, I suggested a new drinking game: Drink every time an opponent of ACES mentioned "China" or "India" as reasons to oppose the legislation.

This "China card" usually goes: The US cannot cap greenhouse gas pollution unless China does too, because it will hamper our economy while theirs barrels forward unchecked! We'll lose out to the Chinese [i.e. the Communists]. This tactic is a holdover from the latter end of the 1990s. The GOP and astroturf groups used it as part of their successful efforts to block US participation in the international accord to cap greenhouse pollution.

(A corollary argument: "There's no point in capping carbon here because it won't curb global warming unless China (and India, Brazil and Russia) do it too." This is used a bit less, perhaps because voicing it would imply that one acknowledged the reality of global warming in the first place.)

Now, with eyes turning to clean energy and carbon cap prospects in the Senate, opponents are evoking another Clinton-era haunting, this one from 1993: then-President Clinton's attempt to enact an energy tax. The Senate never took up the idea, and the Republican Party used it to help gain control of the House of Representatives in 1994.

"There are enormous differences between the two situations and initiatives," however, Times reporter Andrew Revkin writes in his DotEarth blog:

The 1993 tax was pursued  mainly as a source of revenue to cut the deficit, not a means of reducing American dependence on foreign oil and cutting risks of dangerous climate change. But there is one similarity. Democrats, particularly from coal states, helped set the stage for the failure of the 1993 tax, according to various experts, and according to Mr. Clinton. ... Democrats from states that produce or depend on fossil fuels have been slow to buy into the [current] climate bill.

Climate action opponents were out in force over the weekend, staking a claim to the bill's fate in the Senate. Sen. James Inhofe appeared on Fox, and here's Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Sunday's Meet the Press: "“This bill coming out of the House is going nowhere in the Senate."

But this White House Advisor David Axelrod notes, a few weeks ago no one even thought there would be any House vote on the bill: