Senate Climate Bill Advances Despite GOP Boycott

By Jessica Dye

Law360, New York (November 05, 2009) -- U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., moved forward with a vote on her climate change bill Thursday, winning approval for the legislation despite the absence of the committee's Republican members.

Democratic committee members voted 11-1 to report the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, sponsored by Boxer and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., with Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., casting the sole vote against the bill.

The bill advanced without any amendments because committee rules prohibit any markup work from taking place without the presence of at least two members of the minority party. Committee Republicans sat out sessions scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, saying they would not return until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had performed a thorough economic rundown on the Senate bill, and were absent from Thursday's vote.

Boxer repeatedly attempted to address Republican concerns during the week, inviting EPA officials in to answer committee questions Tuesday and twice extending the deadline for minority amendments to the bill. Thursday morning, she exercised her authority under committee rules to report the legislation anyway with the support of a simple majority of all committee members.

Six senior Republican committee members sent a letter to Boxer on Tuesday, asking her to delay markup for the four to five weeks needed to perform a more complete EPA analysis.

Ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla., said he was “deeply disappointed” with Boxer's maneuvering, calling it a violation of committee rules and saying that it would signal “the death knell for the Kerry-Boxer bill.”

EPA officials told committee Democrats on Tuesday that they had already performed “unprecedented” studies on the legislation, and that further work would waste agency resources and set back the Senate time line for the bill significantly. Rather, they asked Republicans to wait until all committees had completed work and pledged to provide comprehensive analysis on the composite bill put together by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Democratic members expressed frustration with the Republican boycott, calling it a partisan tactic that prevented them from offering amendments to certain aspects of the bill, including its carbon emission reduction targets, clean energy funding and agricultural and manufacturing protections.

“It's not something we wanted to do,” Boxer said Thursday. She pledged to work with committee members to work their changes into the legislation as it is combined with other committees' work on the bill in advance of full Senate consideration.

Baucus said he planned to support climate change legislation eventually, but that he remained concerned about the committee bill's midterm carbon emission targets, which would set a goal of reducing carbon levels 20 percent over 2005 levels by 2020, as well as its protections for agricultural producers and cost to the economy.

The bill — which builds on legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year, proposing first-ever national carbon regulation under a cap-and-trade mechanism, as well as new renewable fuel standards and incentives promoting clean and low-carbon energy development — still has a long way to go.

Six committees have jurisdiction over the bill, and the EPW committee is only the second to have completed its portion. On Wednesday, Kerry announced he was teaming with Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., to work on a “dual track” version of the bill in cooperation with the White House and business interests.

Kerry said Thursday that the committee approval would help build momentum to keep the bill moving, particularly in advance of United Nations talks on a global carbon-reduction pact this December in Copenhagen.

As work continues, Scott Segal, a partner at Bracewell & Guiliani LLP, said that lawmakers would be taking a long look at broad cost containment measures across the bill, including its impact on manufacturers, fossil-fuel reliant regions of the country and petroleum refiners.

“In some respects, today's action is more the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end,” he said.