Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has officially scheduled a markup hearing for Tuesday on the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733).
POLITICO reports that committee Republicans are threatening to “boycott any mark-up hearing held next week.”
The boycott, led by the committee’s two most moderate Republican members, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, illustrates the difficulty for Democrats in getting significant bipartisan backing for their climate bill – even among Republican lawmakers who support taking action to combat climate change.
“I’m willing to work with the people on the other side of the aisle but if you jam this thing through here, it’s not going to be good,” Voinovich said on Thursday.
Republicans on the committee released this statement last night after the hearing was scheduled:
"The taxpayers expect us to know what this 1,000-page bill costs before we start voting on it. They will only know this if we have a full economic analysis of how Kerry-Boxer affects them. This bill threatens Americans with trillions of dollars in higher energy taxes and millions of lost jobs. Yet as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted this week, EPA has ‘not run the full economic modeling.’ We cannot move forward in the legislative process if we don’t have a complete understanding of this bill."
But Senator Boxer is reportedly ready to break precedent, if necessary, to work around this delay.
Republicans say that EPW rules prohibit Boxer from holding a mark-up without two Republicans present. Democratic aides for Boxer and other members indicated that they had found a way around that rule, saying that they expected to proceed with the hearing on Tuesday, even if Republicans don’t attend.
“The Senator is going to use all the tools at her disposal,” said one Boxer aide.
A separate release from committee Republicans called this a “nuclear option,” further ratcheting up the partisan fireworks we can likely expect when the markup starts.
Finally, here’s the crux of both sides’ argument on the delay issue.
Ranking Republican member Inhofe cited the two years of negotiations over former President George W. Bush’s “Clear Skies” initiative, where he says Republicans postponed the mark-up several times as Democrats pushed for more information. Inhofe also struggled to get enough support for the legislation during that same period, as Republicans then held a very narrow margin on the committee.
“That was a very deliberative process and I think we need to be somewhat deliberative,” he said.
But Boxer noted that the EPA conducted a more through analysis of the House bill, and her legislation borrows heavily from that legislation.
“Their objections don’t pass the smell test,” she said. “It seems to me they just want to delay this and delay it so we don’t make progress.”
You can read the legislation in question here.
(credit image – guardian)
Congress in Your Pocket
You people in the Senate pass this DeathCare and Now you want to Pass Cap and Tax? I SWEAR I will Vote EVERYONE on the DEMS side out!!!