UPDATE: Boxer Holds Vote Without Republicans, Inhofe Responds
UPDATE: Sen. Barbara Boxer held a vote this morning in the Environment and Public Works Committee without any Republicans present and has passed the climate change bill out of committee.
Montana Democrat Max Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, voted against the measure leading Republican James Inhofe to declare “that bill is dead.”
ORIGINAL POST: Does the senate have any hope of passing a climate change bill before the Copenhagen talks on Dec. 7?
No. Maybe. We don’t know.
As of right now, the process is a disaster. Republicans, led by Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, have boycotted the markup process in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee because they want a more extensive (and totally unnecessary) five-week EPA review of the bill.
Democratic Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer has threatened to conduct the markup without them.
(The above Tulsa World story has the fascinating and bizarre detail that Inhofe and Boxer were holding hands while talking about their long friendship. What this means we have no idea.)
So John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham have stepped up and said they will start putting together a bill with the White House that can pass the senate. Grist’s David Roberts points out that it’s telling Kerry feels the need to write another bill to compete with the legislation he’s already written.
In any case, Roberts says, Boxer’s influence in the process appears to be waning, because too many senators want her to fail.
The Washington Post reports that Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada was always going to have to stitch together the bills after they pass through six committees full of bloviating obscurantists, so this new track of negotiations is not exactly surprising.
But, what of this new bill?
It seems like it will include more nuclear and offshore drilling provisions, which we expected after Kerry and Graham wrote an editorial in The New York Times saying they would include those.
But apparently cap and trade has become problematic for Republicans, which is probably why the Kerry-Boxer bill didn’t mention it in the first place.
That’s a pretty big problem, particularly when it comes time to reconcile the senate bill with the house measure, which includes a cap and trade provision.
