Mass. Senate Race Threatens to Shift Political Landscape for Climate Legislation

Massachusetts voters go to the polls today to elect a replacement for the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, and the outcome could have serious implications for climate legislation.

This election will make or break the Democrats’ current 60-vote majority in the Senate, which is just enough right now to end a Republican filibuster. Much of the national discussion centers on the health care bill, which Republican candidate Scott Brown opposes. But a Republican victory also would likely mean defeat for cap-and-trade legislation this year.

Brown, a state senator, has indicated that he would eagerly side with Congress’s Republican leaders against regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

He writes on his campaign web site that he opposes cap-and-trade, and he carefully qualifies any support of environmental policies or renewable energy by saying he supports them if they fit his definitions of “common-sense” or “reasonable” — two subjective phrases frequently used by supporters of high-polluting industries to criticize environmental protection.

Democrat Martha Coakley’s campaign site has a more extensive explanation of the state attorney general’s positions, starting with this statement: “Martha recognizes that climate change is one of the most pressing moral issues of our time.”

Seeing what appears to be a close race, several groups worried about preserving the Democrats’ 60 votes have been pouring support into Coakley’s campaign. The League of Conservation Voters rolled out a $350,000 ad campaign in the final week criticizing Brown’s environmental positions.

“Instead of transitioning to a clean energy economy, Scott Brown would take us back to the failed Bush-Cheney energy policies — siding with the big oil companies who oppose energy reform over new clean energy jobs for Massachusetts workers,” said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski.

A strong showing by Brown in largely Democratic Massachusetts could also have the effect of pressuring Democrats to run on an even weaker environmental platform in the coming elections, said Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica. “If we are in a Senate scenario of Coakley losing, there will be a lot of reassessing how to get stuff done."

What If Democrats Lose Their 60-Vote Majority?

The Democrats still have open routes to congressional action, even if they lose the 60 Senate votes needed for cloture.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told Bloomberg in an interview Friday that the party had already prepared for a possible shift to the reconciliation process when it wrote the health care bill. Reconciliation, which uses the budget process, sets a 20-hour time limit on debate, allowing legislation that meets certain requirements to pass with a simple majority vote of 51 without the threat that a filibuster could prevent any movement at all.

The current climate legislation wouldn’t have quite so simple a ride, though. Last spring, 26 Senate Democrats voted in favor of a Republican amendment to the 2010 budget to prohibit the “use of reconciliation in the Senate for climate change legislation involving a cap and trade system.”

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is working with Democrat John Kerry on a bipartisan climate bill in the Senate, also opposes the use of reconciliation. And Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) told the Washington Post in June: “Reconciliation was never designed to write substantive legislation. It was designed solely for deficit reduction. The whole idea was you would change numbers, not policy.” More recently, Conrad suggested that climate legislation was unlikely to pass in an election year.