Stubborn rightists openly hostile to Rep. McCarthy’s milquetoast climate ideas
Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic writes—This Is Why the GOP Can’t Have Nice Climate Plans. Some Republicans want to respond to moderates’ concerns about global warming. Others are appalled by any concessions at all:
California Representative Kevin McCarthy just can’t catch a break. Parts of his district were on fire last year, and—thanks partially to those blazes—climate change is a top concern for voters in his state, which has passed some of the most ambitious emissions reductions measures in the nation. Yet fossil fuel interests have been some of McCarthy’s most loyal contributors. And so long as Trump is in the White House, climate denial is likely to remain the GOP’s de facto party line. Like other Blue State Republicans, McCarthy has to walk a careful line.
So far, he’s fallen flat. Reception of the package of climate-scented bills he’s begun pushing as House minority leader has been cautious at best, openly hostile at worst. Imagined as a counter to the Green New Deal and a means to ensure the party doesn’t lose younger, more climate-conscious voters, they emphasize so-called market-based solutions and technologies like carbon capture and storage. As I wrote recently, these proposals are radically out of touch with the kinds of changes actually needed, relying too much on tree planting and unwieldy technology to get the job done. But even these milquetoast measures have faced intense backlash from within McCarthy’s party. […]
Until recently, climate change usually played second, third or fourth fiddle to concerns like jobs and the economy, so the GOP’s carbon revanchism didn’t really cost them. But now, as a new generation of voters comes of age, an upswing of protests and extreme weather has pushed global warming to the top of voters’ priorities. According to a recent poll, 77 percent of young, right-leaning voters say the climate crisis is an important issue to them. More than half say it will impact how they vote this year. Overall, 7 out of 10 registered voters say they want the government to do something to curb warming, and nearly three-quarters say they’re more likely to support candidates that will place stronger regulations on corporate polluters. Republicans are generally happy with minority rule, but if they want to maintain democratic majorities, they may need to choose between pleasing increasingly climate-anxious constituents and donors eager to stop Congress from doing anything about climate change at all. […]
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“In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. “Judges are like umpires,” he said at his confirmation hearing. “Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, “Judges are not politicians.” None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote […] task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court’s work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases.”
~~Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (2007)
At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—Vice President Biden: ‘The test ban treaty is as important as ever‘:
It’s turning out to be a rather eventful week for nuclear weapons news, on both the domestic front and the international stage. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to deal with what’s going on in the US in this post, and address international issues separately.
First of all, the Obama administration is in the home stretch regarding the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR); the President’s national security team met yesterday to discuss the options they will present to the president, so he can make his final decision regarding “U.S. nuclear policy, strategy, capabilities and force posture” for at least half of the next decade. It is a legislatively mandated review, and I’ve written about it in several previous posts. Since the meeting was behind closed doors, we don’t know many specifics, but national security expert and Ploughshares Fund president Joe Cirincione has laid out what form he thinks the final NPR should take.
Secondly, today, the administration continued to prove its ability to multitask on nuclear weapons issues. Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech at the National Defense University in which he basically expanded on his Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from several weeks ago, in which he discussed the proposed budget for the nuclear weapons complex, and why it is important in the overall national security picture.
As Travis Sharp noted over at the Nukes of Hazard, Biden’s speech today took the middle ground regarding criticism of the new nuclear budget.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump’s out criming, again, and his impeachment defense team is shocked! Ex-DoJ-ers alarmed by Barr are now joined by the Federal Judges Association. Joan McCarter, as always, has an eye on Collins’ “deeply troubling” history of campaign law violations.
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