With the entire U.S. political world engaged in handicapping the likely outcome of the health care reform debate, while others focus on the Obama administration’s impending decision on strategy and troop levels for Afghanistan, there hasn’t been much attention paid outside advocacy groups to prospects for action on climate change legislation (passed, as you might recall, by the House during the summer).
The general prognosis has been pretty negative, in part because of the extreme difficulty encountered in getting the revised Waxman-Markey legislation through the House (requiring compromises that left a lot of advocates cold or lukewarm), and in part because the Senate was so absorbed with health reform.
But last weekend the leading Senate climate change legislation advocate, John Kerry, threw a change-up that will at the very least require a recalibration of expectations, by signing onto a New York Times op-ed with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham offering a new “deal”: combining a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions with provisions liberalizing offshore oil drilling and relaxing regulations on nuclear power development.
The op-ed is worth reading in its entirety, but aside from offering conservatives the carrot of more U.S. oil and nuclear power, it also bluntly threatens the stick of unileratal action on climate change by the Obama administration:

Failure to act comes with another cost. If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations. Imposed regulations are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.
The message to those who have stalled for years is clear: killing a Senate bill is not success; indeed, given the threat of agency regulation, those who have been content to make the legislative process grind to a halt would later come running to Congress in a panic to secure the kinds of incentives and investments we can pass today. Industry needs the certainty that comes with Congressional action.

This threat may actually be welcomed by hard-core Republican pols who would lick their chops at the idea of “bureaucrats” end-running Congress to set up a cap-and-trade system, but not by those industries that would actually be affected, particularly since the business community is already divided on the issue.
The op-ed also discusses the national security case for action on climate change, and as Brad Plumer at The Vine notes, this argument polls well, has some appeal to conservatives, and also explains why Foreign Relations Committee chairman Kerry has for the moment displaced Barbara Boxer of CA as the “face” of the climate change initiative in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver goes through the Senate membership and tries to assess which specific senators might be moved by a new bipartisan “deal” on climate change:

So what does this get the Democrats? It gets them Linsday Graham’s vote, and possibly Lisa Murkowski’s. It takes Mark Begich from a leaner to a likely yes. It might encourage Mary Landrieu, and possibly George LeMieux of Florida, to look more sympathetically at the bill. Then there are a whole host of more remote possibilities: Isakson of Georgia, and perhaps Cochran and Wicker of Mississippi or Burr of North Carolina; none of those votes are likely, but they become more plausible with offshore drilling in place. Overall, it seems to be worth something like 2-4 votes at the margin.
That would give the Kerry-Graham bill a fighting chance, especially if an additional vote or two — possibly John McCain’s — can also be picked up as a result of the nuclear energy compromise. Of course, that’s assuming that no liberals would rebel against the new provisions, but the opposition to both offshore drilling and nuclear energy seems to be fairly soft in the liberal caucus

On this last point, it’s worth noting that Dave Roberts of Grist, a highly credible warrior for action on climate change, adjudges the concessions on oil and nuclear energy “an affordable price [to pay] for the benefits of passing a bill.”
If nothing else, Kerry’s gambit has shuffled the deck, complicated Republican claims that Democrats are uninterested in genuine bipartisanship, and offered a sign of potential progress in advance of international climate change negotiations in December. All in all, it’s a good example of strategic audacity on an extraordinarily wonky issue, and well worth watching.

There was an interesting blogospheric exchange yesterday between Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver about the differences between the two parties’ Senate Caucuses on disciplinary issues. Matt expressed a very common progressive envy for the willingness of Republicans to threaten serious sanctions for heterodoxy on key issues:

The Senate Republican caucus is organized, like the House caucuses of both parties, like a partisan political organization whose objective is to advance the shared policy objectives of the party. The Senate Democratic caucus, by contrast, is organized like a fun country club trying to recruit members. Join Team Democrat and Vote However You Want Without Consequence!

Nate, however, wonders how effective Republican Senate hardball tactics have been over the years in building a strong and loyal Caucus. Taking the 10 GOP senators deemed (by one credible measurement) most “liberal” in 2001, here’s Nate’s count of what’s happened to them:

[Of the ten, there have been] two defections (Jeffords and Specter), two losses (Chafee and Smith), two retirements (Warner and Fitzgerald), two Senators that the party can pretty much no longer rely upon (Snowe and Collins), and finally, two who have indeed become more conservative and remained loyal to their party (McCain and Cochran). That’s a .200 batting average, which isn’t good in baseball and isn’t any better in the Senate.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the size of the Senate Republican Caucus has also shrunk by 20% since 2001, but Nate makes the excellent point that enforced unity has its limits as a party-building exercise. Probably the best response to that kind of argument is simply that one joins a political party in the first place (particularly if you are a progressive) to get things done in the real world. If the “big tent” keeps thwarting that objective in fundamental ways, then its size is pretty much irrelevant.

As noted in the update to the last staff post, Sen. Olympia Snowe voted for the revised Baucus Bill in the Senate Finance Committee today. To hear Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, Snowe just wanted to keep the ball rolling, and didn’t necessarily like a thing about the bill itself.
At the same time, the National Republican Senatorial Committee came out with this blast at Sen. Blanche Lincoln for casting the exact same vote:

“It very troubling that Senator Lincoln went back on her word and decided to vote in favor of a bill that will ultimately shift costs to voters in Arkansas who are still struggling to make ends meet,” said NRSC spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson Marchand. “Despite her assertions to the contrary, Blanche Lincoln has effectively opened the door with this vote for a government-run program that will come between her constituents and their doctors and potentially cause over 88 million Americans to lose their coverage.”

You don’t have to be Aristotle to understand the logical contradiction between these two spins from the GOP side of the Senate.

The progressive zeitgeist during the last week has leaned pretty strongly in the direction of a health care reform system that would provide for a strong public option that states could either opt into or opt out of, as opposed to a “triggered” public option where, in theory at least, objective market conditions would determine what happens in particular states.
Interestingly enough, one of the Democratic senators considered shaky on health reform, Bill Nelson of Florida, said today he favored the “trigger” over any state option. When you look at the state Nelson represents, you can perhaps understand it. At present, Florida has a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature, and is facing a highly competitive 2010 election cycle. (For the record, I’ve been raising my own alarms about the impact of a state option on the dynamics of the 2010 elections at the state level).
Why isn’t this point of view held more generally? It could be because the “trigger” idea emerged earlier than the various state option schemes, so that insistence on an “untriggered” public option became part of the general campaign against abandonment of the public option altogether. Or it may be because many progressives, citing polls, think the public option is so popular that resistance in the states can be overcome.
I don’t quite understand why anyone would assume that state legislatures are more resistant than the U.S. Senate to the blandishments and pressure of the forces opposing the public option, but it’s a legitimate argument in a debate that really needs to break out among all advocates of health care reform. Barring a “robust” national system, the public option is in fact going to be “triggered” in parts of the country one way or another. The question is who or what does the “triggering,” under what sorts of circumumstances.

Like a lot of progressive observers, I have obtained an impression of where conservatives and the Republican Party stand today from a variety of sources, including Republican politicians, right-wing journalists and bloggers, friends and family members of the conservative persuasion, and what I’ve learned about the conservative zeitgeist over many years.
Conor Friedersdorf is suppyling a new and fascinating source, via a short questionnaire he has distributed to Republican county chairmen around the country. He is posting responses, verbatim, at a new website called The GOP Speaks. Given the vast number of county chairs, no one response necessarily means a lot, but cumulatively (he’s up to 21 of them by now), they are very interesting, and generally reinforce the impression that grassroots GOPers are driving the pols to the right, not following them. Virtually all of them attribute socialist motives to the Obama administration, and most (while often distancing themselves from Bill O’Reilly) approve of the abrasive messages being dished out by right-wing cable types. There are a few calls for a “big tent party,” but only in the context of avoiding disputes between hard-core conservatives of different hues; quite a few denounce RINOs and explicitly call for a move to the Right.
As Dana Goldstein has pointed out, Friedersdorf’s respondents illustrate the striking extent to which conservatives have internalized the idea–which used to be a real fringe preoccupation–that contemporary liberals aren’t just proposing bad policies for the country, but are consciously and effectively destroying constitutional government. She suggests, plausibly, that some of this mindset may reflect the influence of Ron Paul and his followers, and perhaps also indicates an eclipse in the power of social conservatives. I’m not sure about this latter contention; it’s the right-to-lifers, after all, who have in the past most notably argued that the constitution was being shredded by “liberal activists” who were trying to remake America in the image of secular Europe if not Nazi Germany.
In any event, it’s a good idea to check in now and then on Friedersdorf’s unvarnished responses, particularly if you don’t have occasion to spend much time around grassroots conservatives in your daily life.

Amidst the widely varying perspectives on the health care reform battle, one astute observer, Chris Bowers of Open Left, has always had a very clear focus. He’s viewed the public option fight in the context of a potentially momentous test of strength between congressional progressives (notably the House Progressive Caucus) and the Blue Dogs. In fact, Bowers has been something of a prime mover in what he’s dubbed the “Progressive Block” strategy, wherein the Democratic Left begins to emulate, in carefully chosen cases, Blue Dog willingness to threaten defeat for administration-backed legislation if its minimum requirements aren’t met.
Chris has become reasonably satisfied that the “Progressive Block” has or at least should have a big impact on the shape of health reform legislation. So now he’s looking down the road to other issues for which this strategy might be approrpriate:

[W]hat should House Progressives target next if they achieve this proof of concept? Climate change might not be feasible, since almost every House Progressive already voted in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Afghanistan probably won’t work, since their won’t be anymore supplemental appropriation bills (it will be merged into the budget now), and because Republicans will vote in favor of Afghanistan funding as long as it isn’t tied to any other legislation. Financial regulation is difficult because it requires drawing a bright line on such a murky subject. Immigration is a possibility, but given all of the delays in even introducing an immigration bill, it isn’t clear at all that the Democratic leadership considers immigration reform to be must-pass legislation.
The best bet is for Progressives to target the budget next year. Specifically, they should demand a substantial, probably 10%, increase in taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

Chris goes on to explain this suggestion in terms of various criteria: the upper-end tax cut would be popular, populist, fiscally responsible, unacceptable to any conservatives, and clearly eligible for budget reconciliation treatment (which avoids the 60-vote barrier in the Senate). In other words, it would be a potentially successful and fruitful initiative that would be highly differentiating by party and ideology. He doesn’t explicitly say this, but it would also represent a pretty direct challenge to the deficit-obsessed Blue Dogs.

This item, a follow-up to J.P. Green’s post earlier, was cross-posted at The New Republic.
Taking a quick look around the right-wing fever swamps this morning, it was possible to form the opinion that the Nobel Prize Committee had honored Barack Obama with its peace prize in order to confuse and enrage American conservatives.
The Right clearly did not coordinate its talking points. There was in fact a breakfast buffet of reactions.
Dismissal of the prize as “anti-American” was one approach. At The Corner, Andy McCarthy suggested it be renamed the “Yasir Arafat Peace Prize,” and denounced the award as a “symbolic statement of opposition to American exceptionalism, American might, American capitalism, American self-determinism, and American pursuit of America’s interests in the world.”
Others went for pure snark along the traditional lines of mocking Obama as “The One.” Here’s Ann Althouse:

The question isn’t why did they give Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. The question is why didn’t he get the Olympics.
The story of Barack Obama is the story of winning things when he hasn’t yet done enough to deserve them. He is, quite simply, Barack Obama. We understand that. Why didn’t the IOC understand? You could see it in that smile on his face, when he concluded his little speech in Copenhagen, that he bore the sublime knowledge he would acquire the Olympics for Chicago. Because he is Barack Obama, the man to whom grand prizes are given.

Then there were those who suggested a sinister intention by the Nobel Committee to force Obama even further in his horrible anti-American direction. That was the tack taken by Rush Limbaugh:

And with this award the elites of the world are urging Obama THE MAN OF PEACE not to do the surge in Afghanistan, not take action against Iran and its nuclear program and to basically continue his intentions to emasculate the United States.

Finally, and I didn’t delve deeply into such literature, some on the Right just went nasty nuts. Behold the reaction of Erick Erickson of the prominent conservative site RedState: “I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news.”
(Oops, sorry, I forgot: by mentioning this slur, I am guilty of playing the “race card.”)
It will be interesting to see which of these interpretive themes will emerge as the conservative consensus choice. One thing’s for sure: the Right will claim what many have called an “aspirational award” damages Obama’s domestic political standing, for that is their own fond aspiration.

The last staff post on public option alternatives percolating in the Senate really got me thinking: are the senators or health reform advocates kicking around state-based approaches to the public option really thinking through the political implications of taking this route? Or are they just focused on their own legislative problems?
The one thing that’s clear about these approaches is that they would considerably ramp up the importance of health reform in state politics going into an already crazy 2010 election cycle. I’ve got a post up at The New Republic raising this issue, and wondering if state politicians in either party are quite ready for this challenge. In effect, letting the states make the most fundamental decisions about how to design a health care system–not just for the Medicaid or SCHIP participants they currently deal with, but for pretty much everybody–would simply shift all the many controversies we’ve seen in Congress this year to state capitals.
It’s hard to say how this would all play out. Chris Bowers suspects Republican-controlled states (including some where a public option is most needed) would kill any sort of public option immediately. Others may be more sanguine given the general popularity of the public option nationally. All I’m saying is that senators and health reform advocates need to think and talk about this political reality at some depth, and not simply seize on state-based approaches as a clever way out of their own dilemmas.
It’s reassuring that one of the proponents of a state-based approach, Tom Carper, is a former Governor, who presumably understands the political implications at the state level. And it’s encouraging that two others, Maria Cantwell and Ron Wyden, are trying to enable the states to adopt reforms more radical than any we would see in a one-size-fits-all national reform template. But a 2010 state political cycle dominated by a raucous health care debate is a tricky proposition, particularly given the potential impact of health industry dollars on legislators and candidates alike.
Look before you leap, senators.