House Climate Bill a Centrist Balancing Act

"The way it works around here is that you never get everything you want all at once," Phil Clapp once instructed me about the way things work in Washington. "You take as big a bite of the apple as you can, and you keep going back over and over. Solving global warming is going to take a generation or more of work."

It's the wise counsel needed for the present moment as the nation gets a first look at what its long-awaited climate law is likely going to look like. U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey today released a discussion draft of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 – a 648-page proposal that provides the blueprint from Democratic lawmakers.

Judging from the short summary that was issued with the bill and from selective dives into its detailed provisions, the bill attempts to execute a powerful long jump while carrying a sack of potatoes.

It's an apt metaphor for the hope and reality of American legislative democracy. The Act is a tremendous leap toward a clean energy future. It calls for renewable energy, modernization of the electrical grid, more electric vehicles and big increases in the efficiency of appliances and buildings. It gets bogged down by the political need to drag behind it a dirty fossil past using various compromises and concessions. It is a brilliantly centrist bill that moves forward while pulling in opposite directions – designed out-of-the-gate to attract the needed votes of heartland lawmakers. That's why the Right wants it destroyed and the Left wants it strengthened.

What illustrates this most poignantly is perhaps the most surprising inclusion, and to many among the most disappointing – a provision to strip EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Both Markey and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the need for the provision, saying their intention is to pass legislation, not to punt the issue to regulators. Members of Congress believe it is their responsibility to answer for the nation what should be done about greenhouses gases, and also to send a clear signal to other countries about what the law of the land is.

Less than two weeks ago, Sen. Barbara Boxer played the EPA card to much better effect when she sent a signal to her colleagues through a press conference by saying:

A lot of my colleagues seem to feel that if we don’t act on [climate] legislation then nothing is going to happen. If Congress does nothing, we’ll be watching EPA do our job.

Indeed, the EPA has been moving swiftly to issue an endangerment finding on CO2 in response to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, so Boxer's words had teeth. Not only that, the agency's swift and aggressive action on mountaintop removal mining, auto emission standards and coal plant permits has earned high marks for Lisa Jackson, the administrator, from those concerned about climate change.

While the proposed bill does reserve a role for EPA on greenhouse gases, it would be a tangential one and would effectively blunt a powerful tool now in the hands of a president who means business.

Pre-empting the EPA is, perhaps, the biggest carrot in the bill to opponents, who, unmollified, are out in force already complaining about Democratic plans to levy the biggest tax in the history of the universe. The centrist offer here seems to be this: Pass the bill and you get to stop Lisa Jackson; kill the bill and the EPA goes nuts. That may be the political calculus here, but you wonder, why didn't the sponsors keep this trump card in their back pocket? That's just a waste of a big bite of the apple everyone can currently taste.