Kerry and Graham whip up compromise on global warming
Washington Examiner
Even as a Senate global-warming bill remained in limbo with Democrats refusing to delay a committee vote until an economic analysis was completed, hopes rose for a potential bipartisan compromise.
The Senate, meanwhile, appears to be moving away from the bill, authored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., which would require a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 and would have the government sell the right to emit carbon dioxide.
Even as Boxer conducted an unusual one-sided hearing on her bill in the Environment and Public Works Committee, Kerry, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., held a news conference to announce they are working on a compromise that might attract GOP votes and has earned a tentative endorsement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Boxer supports this separate effort and made note of it during the hearing. She said the chamber’s endorsement was “a game changer.”
Kerry, Lieberman and Graham released few details about the new bill, but said it would include a cap and trade proposal. They said it would also address increasing nuclear energy, more drilling and clean coal technology, all initiatives that are high on the wish list of Republicans willing to work on a climate change compromise.
Kerry said he and Graham have already had meetings about the new proposal with White House officials, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
The compromise effort increases the chances that a global warming bill could pass the Senate sometime in the next year or two, as the original Kerry-Boxer bill had little GOP support and lots of moderate Democratic opposition.
Boxer, meanwhile, plans to push forward Thursday on the original bill, despite a letter sent late Wednesday from moderate Republicans, including Graham, asking the EPA for an in-depth analysis before proceeding.
Republicans said if Boxer proceeded to vote on amendments or on passing the bill out of committee this week, it would violate rules requiring at least two Republican senators to be present and would kill any chance of bipartisan compromise on climate change legislation.
“Choosing to set aside the committee’s longstanding rules would jeopardize our ability to work together on other issues,’ ” The committee’s top Republican, James Inhofe, R-Okla, warned Boxer, before walking out.
Boxer allowed Democratic members to speak Wednesday, and she and other lawmakers interviewed Democratic committee staff about the bill. She said Republicans are simply trying to stall climate change legislation and should be satisfied with information on the bill the EPA has already provided.
“We are here to fill the record with why we feel it is so important to move forward,” said Boxer. “And why the Republican reason for not showing up is totally without merit.”
Lindsey Graham warns GOP against going too far right
Politico
The morning after Republicans lost an upstate New York House seat, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned that conservative activists will bring destruction to the Republican Party if they drive out moderate candidates across the country.
“To those people who are pursuing purity, you’ll become a club not a party,” Graham told POLITICO in the Capitol Wednesday. “Those people who are trying to embrace conservatism in a thoughtful way that fits the region and the state and the district are going to do well. Conservativism is an asset. Blind ideology is not.”
Graham, who has sparred with his party’s right wing on issues ranging from climate change to Guantanamo Bay to Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, warned that those concerned about the state of the GOP should help find candidates who are electable — not ones who adhere to a particular type of ideology. And he said that both the GOP nominee, Dede Scozzafava and the conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman were both out of the mainstream of the upstate New York district – which lead to the victory of Democrat Bill Owens Tuesday night.
“If your goal is to make everybody just like you in terms of ideology, that’s a self-centered approach to politics,” Graham said.
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Wild Thing’s comment……
I am so sick of these turncoat mole politicians with an R beside their name voting for the liberal bills giving the Dems their precious “bipartisan”.
He’s been in DC since 1995.
Hey Twinkle Toes……..YOU and your ilk are whats wrong with the Republican Party! Conservatives will make it their life’s work to unseat you in the next election!
“If your goal is to make everybody just like you in terms of ideology, that’s a self-centered approach to politics,” Graham said”. Oh my goodness, are these people totally stupid or what? So now giving up your principles is being praised as “altruistic”? I’m sure that our adversaries, who NEVER give up THEIR ideology, will be grinning when they hear this!
I’m saying again, these people have been in D.C. too long, and have been brainwashed. It is what I call the “tap on the back” phenomemnon: they become addicted to being tapped on the back as “good guys” by the press, the president, the “establishment”, the “insiders”, and slowly they give up their principles in order to “belong” to the “in-crowd” and get tap on the back. Yep, you need a real baaaaad character to stick to your guns in D.C.!!
These people have completely forgotten what they were hired to do–serve us! We pay their paychecks, we give them their cushy jobs to work for us and how do they repay us? By cutting off our arms and legs with more taxes to line their own pockets. From now on, if anything like Crap and Tirade, or that stupid, good for nothing health care bill passes, no one will be safe on either side of the aisle. They can be replaced!
It seems like Graham just can’t make up his mind about cap and trade. He supports it, he doesn’t . . . It’s anybody’s guess what he will be saying later on this afternoon, much less when this bill actually comes to a vote on the Senate floor. We must ensure the rest of our representatives know how we feel about the negative impacts of cap and trade, and vote accordingly. Write Congress at http://tiny.cc/duzT9 and let your legislators know you do not support a bill that will cost Americans millions of jobs and raise energy prices.
This could almost be believable if these 3 weren’t involved in this charade. All of the congress, 535 of these mental midgets believe in Climate Change. What are they using as a yard stick to judge the extent of Global Warming ?
Why Algore’s alarmist histrionics in the Senate and pleading that the sky is falling and it is our fault. This is what the Congress is basing Global warming on. Algore a Seminary school drop out who is now touted as an expert on Global Warming…According to whom ?
The real experts have doubts about any climate change at all, and don’t believe for a minute that man is at fault.
Algore uses sophistry for his arguments, Hottest temperatures, algore says, ever…meaning recorded. Well we didn’t start keeping track of temperatures until about 120 years ago. Going by the Bible, that the Earth is about 6000 years old, then how accurate can our recording of temperatures be? We have been keeping track of temperatures for a mere 120 years, but what about all the data that has not been tracked. Meaning, 5880 years of missing data. So how do you make a conclusion when 95% of your data is missing ?
Technically speaking we have no idea what the earth is doing as far as temperatures go. Yet Congress in all their “Wisdom” is going to save the planet, of course at our expense.
This Cap and Trade goes right back to Social Justice better known as “Redistribution of Wealth”, meaning our wealth, that of the United States.
Increasing nuclear, and fossil fuels? Well then there’s no point in the damn bill. Grahamnesty you’re an idiot, or maybe it’s more sinister than that like he’s complicit with barack mugabe’s agenda in this crap and tax bill.
By the way doesn’t it look like hari-kerry got his face stuck in a taffy puller when he was a kid.
The Pols, realize that most of their agenda re Health Care and Cap and Trade is in the tank. Thereby they tinker with it,like these two losers , or in the case of Barbara Boxer,in committee yesterday, they just try and ram it down our throats.
As Lynn said these people have forgotten what they are hired to do. There is no greater argument for term limits than situations like this.
Unfortuately term limits will never come to, be because these clowns will have to vote on it themselves.
Lindsey Graham and John Kerry have no ethics. They criticise those who do. Well, screw them. They are wrong. Their main purpose is to put more power in the government and therefore, more power in their hands.
Lindsey Graham is worse than Bob Dole the Great Compromiser. Dole never met a proposed bill he couldn’t compromise on, even his own. Rinos tend to be that way. If Graham doesn’t like the way his party members who are “pursuing purity” and adhering to a particular type of philosophy than he should switch partys or resign. Most Americans, right or left, don’t vote for a compromising, mind changing, indecisive politician. They usually vote for someone they think is firm on issues.
Seems that the GOP has evolved into the party of compromise, here’s our plank, let’s negotiate. Rockefeller Republicans, RINO’s to me, lets go back to ’45 when the Rockies gave the UN the plot on the East River to entrench the Communists in the midsts of Manhattan. The mindsets of both parties have been set by both the Rockefellers and the UN, there are no principles, no ethics only compromises and capitulation to Communist agendas. They to a man ignore the constitution and the oaths they all swore, they run amok with impunity, between their two and 4 year term windows as untouchable self serving entities, then at election time they put on their Halloween good guy masks and hand out candy to curry favors. We’ve been compromised and sold out by the slippery bastards. The only difference is the Democratic party has replaced the American Communist Party, with the GOP close behind.
That RNC form they keep sending out with the obligatory ‘Monday’, the obligatory funneled questionaire, and the payola dunner, nothing has changed in 20 years but the paper it’s written on. It’s the same message to ensure they are in control of the GOP and who the RNC selects and back’s. Walter Reuther and Jimmy Hoffa could have taken training under the RNC on how to be a union boss.
Kerry is one of those Kennedy brothers, from the breech birth event. (Hold on Ethel, you were told to stay away from that wood pile, didn’t listen did ya?) Like pulling a calf they had to reach in there grab him by the head and turn him around, it’s the best I could do to explain a mug longer than a Wildebeests and a disposition to match.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_YrJABjYBE
Jack, I love the video thank you.
Thank you everyone so much.