Harry Reid had insisted that the Senate would produce an energy bill before leaving for summer recess and the campaign trail, and Reid fulfilled his promise. There will be a bill on the agenda that relates to energy, albeit in the most tangential manner. The Senate will consider a bill that repeals the liability caps on oil companies for deepwater drilling, but will avoid altogether anything that looks like a climate-change bill:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had declared July the month to debate and pass comprehensive energy reform legislation.
Instead, the Senate will likely spend only a day this week on a narrow oil-spill response bill that appears fated to stall because of another Republican filibuster. The Senate is scheduled to take a recess until mid-September after this week, giving lawmakers a chance to campaign back in their home states.
Energy legislation isn’t even on the top of this week’s agenda.
There are reasons for that, chiefly that Democrats already have to tote the baggage of ObamaCare on their shoulders as they hit the home stretch of their midterm campaigns. They don’t need to defend another massive government expansion that will hike energy prices everywhere and kill jobs in coal states.
Republicans won’t let them off the hook that easily, however. They’re not only gearing up for an election debate on Democratic attempts to take over the energy industry after their overhaul of the health-care sector, they also will fight the EPA’s endangerment finding and the agency’s attempt to pass climate-change policy by bureaucratic fiat:
President Barack Obama’s ‘Plan B’ for tackling global warming is under attack in the courts and on Capitol Hill.
Through federal lawsuits, two conservative attorneys general, a major coal company and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are leading the charge to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to write its own climate rules.
Key coal-state Democrats and nearly all Republicans are also unified in their bid to slow down the EPA via legislation — and they’re determined to force a series of votes on the issue before the next big suite of rules start kicking in next January.
In a curious reversal, the EPA will have to explain to a court how it can apply a new “tailoring rule” that would allow the agency to keep from enforcing the law on politically-untenable targets, such as churches, schools, and the lawnmowers in the garages of most Americans. The opponents of the EPA regulations have argued that the agency has to apply their rules equally, and cannot pick and choose based on political considerations. The point is that the rules are so damaging and intrusive that enforcement more or less puts the EPA in charge of everything and everyone.
Small wonder that the EPA has put off its rulemaking until January, when it won’t impact the midterms. That’s also why Reid ended up reneging on his vow to press forward with climate-change legislation as well, and why the lame-duck session may loom large for the Kerry-Boxer bill sidelined at the moment.
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