American politics
Democracy in America
Congress and climate change
Congress, climate change and incompetent grandstanding
Feb 9th 2011, 22:18 by E.M. | WASHINGTON, DC
MY COLLEAGUES have been discussing climate change, and it's worth noting that global warming used to be the subject of genuine political debate in Washington as well. Al Gore made a movie about it. Barack Obama vowed to put a stop to it (indeed, he claimed that he had begun to lower sea levels simply by being nominated for the presidency). Congress pored over a series of detailed laws designed to tackle it. The House of Representatives even passed one.
No longer. The bill the House passed made no headway in the Senate, even with a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. Now that the Democrats have lost the House and seen their majority shrink in the Senate, the chances of an emissions-cutting measure getting through Congress are nil. Indeed, Republicans want to move in the opposite direction, and strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. But the chances of that succeeding are also close to zero, since the president has promised to veto any such move.
It should be of little surprise, then, that the hearing held today by the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee on reining in the EPA was more about grandstanding than about legislating. A series of Republicans asked Lisa Jackson (pictured), the head of the EPA, whether she was aware of how many jobs she was killing by raising energy prices and whether she was happy about it. A series of Democrats asked Mrs Jackson whether she was aware of how many lives she was saving by fighting pollution, and whether it would be a good idea to let those people die. Mrs Jackson, the supposed star witness, had only a minor role in it all.
Committee hearings are always like this. After smarmy exchanges about how delighted they are to be speaking to one another, congressmen ask grotesquely biased “Gotcha!” questions that the witnesses, usually harried officials, do their best not to respond to in a meaningful fashion. There are a lot of requests, almost always ignored, for yes or no answers. Mrs Jackson, for example, expended considerable time and effort not saying that greenhouse-gas regulation would raise energy prices and thus harm the economy.
Sometimes, the pretence of give-and-take is abandoned altogether. This morning, Joe “Sorry BP” Barton, a Republican from Texas, asked a laughably leading question, requested a yes or no answer, and then—before receiving one—told Mrs Jackson, “The answer is no.” When she asked, with faux naivety, whether Mr Barton wanted her to answer the question herself or comment on his remarks, he replied with admirable honesty that he didn’t.
What was surprising, given how long Congress has debated this subject, is how incompetent the grandstanding was. I’m reconciled to the fact that America’s congressmen are not all silver-tongued Ciceros. Indeed, most of them seem to have trouble following a train of thought, finishing a sentence or getting noun and verb to agree. Several appeared not to know that the heinous acts they were complaining about were committed not by Mrs Jackson and her staff, but by the courts, or by the administration of George W. Bush. One confused cap-and-trade schemes to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions with the more rigid administrative approach used by the EPA, giving Mrs Jackson a let-out from an otherwise awkward question. Another did not seem to know that Congress had the power to overturn executive regulations. A third proudly declared the he was an engineer, and so knew a thing or two about science, only to have Mrs Jackson retort that she too was an engineer (oops!), and so knew the importance of deferring to experts in a given field. A fourth made a fart joke, and then proudly declared, “That’s humour!”
But in addition to garbled syntax, muddled arguments and childish behaviour, the Republican attack-dogs were surprisingly off-message (the Democrats shared all these faults too, but this wasn’t their show). Some argued that global warming wasn’t proven, others that the EPA was misinterpreting the Clean Air Act (something the Supreme Court has cleared it of) and yet others that all the EPA’s efforts to control pollution of any sort since its creation in 1970 had placed an intolerable burden on business. A representative from Oregon starting banging on about the treatment of wood-based biomass in a bill that has already been shelved. Another Republican seemed to be arguing that the EPA should adopt more stringent regulations than it has proposed—not a popular idea within the party.
Amid all this confusion, the Republicans’ best argument—that the costs of regulating greenhouse gases are likely to outweigh the benefits in the short term, at least—got lost. The White House is said to be contemplating postponing the EPA’s regulatory drive until after next year’s election, for fear that the Republicans will denounce it as “job-killing” on the campaign trail. And so, doubtless, they will. But if today’s hearing is anything to go by, they are also likely to sully that message with a lot of extreme—and extremely puerile—talk.
(Photo credit: Bloomberg News)
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These type of hearings are always ridiculous, regardless of who's running the "show."
It appears that EM is a victim of anthropogenic hot air. Maybe he has witnessed the only form of global warming that we'll ever see .
I'm reminded of an EPW hearing Sen. Barbara Boxer presided over in June 2009. Politico categorized it under "Antics."
-- Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) didn't like a Brigadier General calling her "ma'am" at an EPW hearing yesterday.
"Do me a favor," she said, "could say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?' It's just a thing, I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it, yes, thank you."
I'm trying to remember the last time that a Congressional hearing actually resulted in a) the members present actually learning something, and b) them actually doing something useful as a result. Maybe someone here can help me out.
But as far as I can tell, legislation is written by Congressional aides, not actual members Congress. And whatever research they do involves no Congressional hearings at all.
If voters stopped falling for it, maybe they'd stop doing it. Good luck.
Remember, Congressional hearings don't exist for Congress to learn anything, they exist for every Congress(wo)man to have a chance to demonstrate their ignorance and narcissism
To an extent they don't have to do anything, high oil prices are doing it for them. It would be nice though if they phased in a tax such that for every $2 oil dropped $1 in tax would be raised, and for every $2 it rose $1 in tax would be reduced. This would achieve much the same effect in a painless way and one that moderated market fluctuations.
Dumb as it is, I think congressional hearings is just one of those things we have to live with. Like herpes.
I did watch one informative hearing though where the congressmen seemed genuinely interested. It was a hearing about voting machine technology. Looks like you have to get pretty damn obscure and non-partisan to have a productive hearing.
I'm surprised at the fart joke. Well and the humor.
Why can't we elect more competent grandstanders?
@ Jaylat: "Why can't we elect more competent grandstanders?"
In theory Obama was supposed to have been this, but in practice I find that I have no more patience for listening to his speeches than for listening to any other politician.
I care more about the environment than I do about your job.
"Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?"
- H.L. Mencken
@ Spectacularj1: "I care more about the environment than I do about your job."
I care more about whether I can breathe then I do about your job.
E.M. wrote: "I’m reconciled to the fact that America’s congressmen are not all silver-tongued Ciceros. Indeed, most of them seem to have trouble following a train of thought, finishing a sentence or getting noun and verb to agree."
Ah, E.M.! I only hope you're aware that what you have observed has long been traditional in American legislatures, especially in Congress. Way before the end of the nineteenth century Congress and its senators and representatives were bywords for hilarious public idiocy. All serious matters were (and are) dealt with behind closed doors. All public matters were (and are) conducted in a manner not only intended to entertain voters but also to convince them that their elected representatives were in no way whatsoever pretending to be any better than those who had elected them.
There are many very, very bright and intelligent senators and representatives who would do anything whatsoever to avoid being labelled as bright and intelligent. It just doesn't normally pay for an American congressman to be seen in that way. If one is in the American business of being elected every so often, the views of periodicals such as the Economist (or its readers) are just plain irrelevant. To my knowledge, the Economist has been publishing since 1844. It's a shame that it probably wasn't (to my knowledge) reporting on American congressional antics from the beginning. Things have not changed.
You can't put a Congressman in front of a TV camera and expect anything other than blather for the folks back home. Hearings are also a form of hazing for powerful bureaucrats, their days of groveling before the Chosen Representatives of the Sovereign People, to legitimize the daily groveling they expect from their thousands of underlings.
The serious discussions go on in private
Al Gore's BS movie a "genuine political debate"?! Please give me a break... teenage campus activists, those victims of inferior education and left-lib propaganda might buy this notion, but I doubt even they would.
I can't take 'global warming' seriously when we've been experience a period of global cooling and the fact that it snowed today for the fifth time in three months in Mississippi, of all places.
"I care about breathing." Please. Have you even looked at the makeup of the atmosphere? Greenhouse gases are a fraction of a percent of the total. You aren't going to suffocate anytime soon, if ever.
@Pilot MKN
Have you visited truly polluted cities like Beijing or Hong Kong? Trust me on this one, it is in America's best interests to make sure we don't get so bad that people cheerily talk about how the sky is actually blue today. You should care about breathing clean air, it's a luxury many in the world don't get to enjoy.
@ ReluctantPolluter: "Al Gore's BS movie a "genuine political debate"?!"
So your point is that the movie had absolutely nothing to do with the debate on global climate change, and it is unreasonable to believe otherwise?