{"id":407430,"date":"2010-03-09T11:19:21","date_gmt":"2010-03-09T16:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=78718"},"modified":"2010-03-09T11:19:21","modified_gmt":"2010-03-09T16:19:21","slug":"senate-primacy-and-the-meaninglessness-of-waxman-markey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/407430","title":{"rendered":"Senate Primacy and the Meaninglessness of Waxman-Markey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard asks a good question<\/a>: Was the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill, debated ad nauseum and eventually passed by the House last June, just a waste of time? After all, the tripartisan Senate group now crafting similar legislation has decided to drop cap-and-trade<\/a> — the central provision of the House measure — from the eventual Senate bill, which will be significantly less aggressive in combating climate change.<\/p>\n

The answer, I think, is something approaching “yes,” although probably for broader reasons than Kate implies in her piece. The real issue at hand is the fundamental weakness of the House vis-\u00e0-vis the Senate. Last spring, when we were all obsessing over every detail of the climate debate in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, I think we didn’t quite appreciate just how subordinate the House had become to the Senate, for the simple reason that we hadn’t yet seen the health care sausage-making play out. <\/span><\/p>\n

Now it seems clear that if health care is to pass at all, House liberals will be forced to swallow their pride and pass a much less progressive Senate bill verbatim, even if there’s room for some smallish changes via reconciliation down the line. Likewise with climate legislation: For all the weeks and months of work that went into producing — and whipping the votes for — the Waxman-Markey bill, the liberals in the lower chamber will almost certainly have to bite the bullet and pass something resembling whatever eventually comes out of the Senate (if anything).<\/p>\n

One has to wonder when the House will lose its desire for vigorous debate over its bills — given that they’re likely to be supplanted by their Senate counterparts — and when we in the media will stop devoting so much ink (or so many pixels) to House debates that are likely to be rendered close to meaningless. I know I, for one, feel a bit silly for having spent so much time scrutinizing every compromise<\/a> that threatened to undermine the efficacy of the Waxman-Markey bill, now that they all seem just about moot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard asks a good question: Was the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill, debated ad nauseum and eventually passed by the House last June, just a waste of time? After all, the tripartisan Senate group now crafting similar legislation has decided to drop cap-and-trade — the central provision of the House […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5443,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-407430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5443"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}