Climate change: Why does President Obama's plan skirt Congress?
With Republicans implacably opposed – and some Democrats still wary of fallout at the polls – there's little prospect of getting climate change reform through Capitol Hill.
The Capitol Dome is seen behind the Capitol Power Plant in Washington on Monday. For years, coal-state lawmakers opposed moves to end the use of coal in the plant, which provides power to buildings in the Capitol Complex. But this month, Congress obtained the last permits needed to complete the transition to 100 percent natural gas.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
WASHINGTON
When President Obama lays out his agenda to fight climate change at Georgetown University on Tuesday, there won’t be a grand push for sweeping climate legislation.
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And that’s mostly because energy, once one of the most bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill, now divides the two parties nearly as starkly as taxes.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are inimically opposed to not only most measures that come stamped “President Obama Approved” but climate initiatives in particular, making anything more than the smallest legislative tweak a near impossibility for GOP lawmakers. It's also a high risk issue for energy state Democrats, especially those facing voters in coal country.
Where liberals see the devastating impact of climate change looming on the horizon, Republicans see overly burdensome rules and regulations from the “Employment Prevention Agency.”
A spokesman for Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky called the president’s planned announcement “a pivot away from jobs,” questioned why Democrats didn’t bring the president’s wanted environmental actions to the floor of the Senate, and claimed the president’s policies would hike utility bills and hurt employment.
Asked about the president’s climate initiative last week, House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio was also unyielding.
“I think this is absolutely crazy,” Speaker Boehner told reporters. “Why would you want to increase the cost of energy and kill more American jobs at a time when the American people are still asking the question, 'Where are the jobs?' ”
That “Where are the jobs?” refrain is a throwback to the speaker’s daily criticism of the president during the 2012 election campaign.
Then, GOP contender Mitt Romney’s only concrete jobs proposal was to vastly expand fossil fuel production, and two of the right’s most well-worn talking points were the Obama administration’s “war on coal” and the bankruptcy of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra (a clear example of Obama’s “crony capitalism” at work).
On energy, the election did little to budge the two sides on Capitol Hill. Then as now, congressional Republicans faced a president who far outstrips them in public approval polls and has a particular edge when voters are asked who cares about them more. In that context, Republicans see energy as a way of connecting with ordinary Americans on pocketbook issues like jobs and utility costs.
In the symbolically important assignment of enumerating House legislative initiatives, the lower the number, the more significant the priority.
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