The lame duck looms

The political reality, however, is that even in a lame-duck session, Democrats would be hard-pressed to come up with a 60-vote majority in the Senate on the sort of hot-button bills now being used to galvanize conservative constituencies.

While some senators headed for the exits may be more inclined to support a lightning-rod issue such as cap and trade, there are still a host of moderate Democrats who will be on the ballot in 2012 and aren’t going to have any more appetite to take a difficult vote on such legislation in December than they were during the regular session.

Consider only the Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2012: Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jim Webb of Virginia. Add in coal-state Gov. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — who’s likely to be a member of the Senate if and when a lame-duck session is called — and it’s difficult to see how Democrats could get anywhere near 60 votes from their moderate wing for an energy bill that included cap and trade. And that calculus doesn’t even consider the prospect that the GOP could win elections to fill unexpired Senate terms in Delaware, Illinois, Colorado and Florida and that the new senators might be seated in time for a post-election session (the law on when they’d be seated varies from state to state).