Yesterday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted to report out climate legislation, with ten Democrats voting yes, one Democrat (Montana’s Sen. Baucus) voting no, and all of the Republicans boycotting. If you look at the vote tally (using Project Vulcan data), you find that the states of senators voting "no" emitted 29.4 tonnes of carbon per capita, and the states of "yes" voters emitted 13.3 tonnes per capita, compared with a national average of 20.9 tonnes per capita.

What do you think? Does this mean that the likely impact of cap-and-trade legislation on the members’ states influenced their votes? We would say it does, as we implied in a post we put up the other day on the household costs by a bill by metro. However, Matthew Yglesias would likely disagree, going by his response to our previous examination of this issue.

Matt doesn’t think representatives from metros (or states) with higher carbon emissions are less likely to support cap-and-trade. Instead, he argues that “the primary driver of the politics of climate change is general ideological factors, followed by the interests of energy producers rather than consumers.” That is, he thinks that industry opposition to carbon legislation is a stronger motivator of "no" votes than consumer opposition—an interesting theory that we can almost buy. Did you see all those anti-climate bill industry ads during the World Series?

Well, that was anti-climactic. The Environment and Public Works Committee just voted 11-1 to approve a cap-and-trade bill and report it out to the Senate floor. Since Republicans were still boycotting the mark-up, creating a stalemate, EPW Democrats just decided to get around them by skipping the usual amendment process—instead, they'll offer their changes later, on the floor.

If Creigh Deeds loses today—and few candidates have hoisted themselves out of the kind of hole he’s dug—let it be known that the Commonwealth of Virginia missed out on having a very nice man in Richmond.

“When you elect a governor, you elect not only their positions, but you elect their character, their heart,” declared Senator Mark Warner, to a gamely cheering crowd of about 150 in Alexandria’s Market Square last night. “This is a good man, a man who has served Virginia and Virginians with distinction.”

“I think there’s something to be said for having a little emotion,” said the state’s other senator, Jim Webb, on Deeds’ well-known sensitivity.

The current governor Tim Kaine then explained that each of his three children in the page program at the Virginia state senate had picked Deeds as his or her favorite senator at the end of the session. “Somebody who is in a high and exalted position, who will take the time to make an impression upon a young person, that’s my kind of person,” Kaine effused. “I know his heart, I know his character, and character counts at the end of the day.”

As the state’s Democratic firmament praised Deeds, the candidate stood off to the side of the stage, smiling, not talking to anyone. When Kaine called him up onstage, Deeds approached people in at the border of the crowd and started hugging and handshaking. Those he made contact with seemed more surprised than anything else to find themselves being embraced by the gangly Deeds; he comes off more like a man pretending to be a candidate than the real thing. 

Whenever I read the words, "You're not from around here, are you?" I automatically imagine them being said with a serious Southern--or at least rural--twang. This election year in Virginia, though, I think that expression has a decidedly suburban lilt--as it's the overwhelming sentiment Creigh Deeds has encountered as he's trawled for votes in Northern Virginia.

Ever since 2001, when their successful gubernatorial candidate Mark Warner commissioned a bluegrass campaign song and sponsored a NASCAR team as part of his "rural strategy," Virginia Democrats have been preoccupied with winning over rural voters, especially in Southwest Virginia. In Deeds, it seemed they'd found the perfect candidate for doing so. A state senator from sparsely populated Bath County near the West Virginia border, Deeds's support of gun rights--not to mention his firsthand experience castrating large farm animals--make him very much at home in Virginia's rural areas. But those traits have made him an alien in Northern Virginia. And despite the best efforts of rural-vote-gurus like Mudcat Saunders to argue otherwise, Virginia Democrats' path to victory still runs through the D.C. suburbs.

It was Halloween 2001, and Kennesaw State freshman Nick Ayers was sitting anxiously in an Atlanta airplane hangar. A friend had recommended him for a campaign position with Republican state senator Sonny Perdue, who was mounting a long-shot gubernatorial run against Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes. The portly, middle-aged politician disembarked his Bellanca Super Viking and, as Ayers recounts the story, walked down the stairs holding a lid-less cup of coffee. Eager to make a good first impression, the nervous blonde teenager extended his hand for a firm shake.

Michael Capuano is my congressman. He does not make me yearn for Joe Kennedy to return. That's the plus side.

He is now running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, that is, for Teddy's seat. He is not the favorite. But neither is my candidate, Alan Khazei, an honest-to-God community organizer who co-founded City Year.

The Clinton Tapes:
Wrestling History with
the President

By Taylor Branch

(Simon & Schuster, 707 pp., $35)

In her infamous first sentence of The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm swings for the fences and proclaims that "every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She means that journalists use their human subjects and then dispose of them; that we con them in person by "preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness"--it occurs to me to note that however bleak print's future seems, journalism will at least never run out of material--before gutting them in print. This was a provocative thought in 1990, in those years of innocence before the Internet turned the guttings into a spectator sport.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is holding hearings this week on the new chairman’s “mark” of the draft Senate climate and energy legislation released Friday night by committee chairman Barbara Boxer and Sen. John Kerry. This document will be the starting point for the next round of debate, and with this draft, we get to see for the first time how the bill proposes to allocate the revenue it would raise through the sale of pollution allowances.

So how does it look? Well, as an earlier, less detailed draft released late last month forecasted, the new draft very much resembles the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House, which means it’s a mixed bag (and quite disturbing on at least one key point). 

On the regulatory side, the outlines are almost identical, with one exception. Like the House, Boxer and Kerry call for a cap-and-trade emissions reduction system, very much like the one the House enacted. Like the House, the senators propose a specific emissions reduction goal--one that would cut emissions by 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and so is slightly stricter than the target in Waxman-Markey. The Kerry-Boxer outline would allow Environmental Protection Agency to set its own emissions regulations for major point sources under the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act while Waxman-Markey would not. But other than that, the bill largely tracks with the House approach on the regulatory side, and even the emissions goal isn’t all that much tighter than that in Waxman-Markey, as a weekend post by Dave Roberts over at Grist makes clear.

After a weekend of furious activity, Democratic leaders in the Senate think they are close to getting the votes they need in order to pass an "opt-out" version of the public option.

But they feel like President Obama could be doing more to help them, with one senior staffer telling TNR on Sunday that the leadership would like, but has yet to receive, a clear "signal" of support for their effort.

The White House, for its part, says President Obama supports a strong public option, as he always has--and that, as one senior administration official puts it, the president will support the Senate leadership in "whichever way" it chooses to go on this particular question.

Read those statements carefully and you'll see they don't actually contradict each other. Instead, they offer a pretty good picture of where the public option debate is at the beginning of a week that could quite possibly decide its fate.

For those just tuning in, the underlying issue here is whether to create a government-run insurance program into which people could enroll voluntarily and that might, ideally, provide more affordable coverage while providing the private insurance industry with much-needed competition. As recently as two or three weeks ago, many observers (this writer included) thought the idea was more or less dead politically.

I'm a bit late in getting to this, but I have to disagree with Suzy Khimm's take on GOP Senator Tom Coburn's co-authoring a piece for The Advocate with Christopher Barron, Chairman of GOProud.

Lawrence Lessig's denunciation of runaway transparency is insightful but unduly dour about the potential consequences of the release of accurate information about public officials. It’s also insufficiently appreciative of the potential benefits of its public dissemination.

As Obama's health care overhaul comes closer and closer to becoming a reality, Republicans have begun to accuse Democrats of sabotaging the very process of making the bill into a law. Mike Enzi--the ranking Republican member of the Senate HELP Committee--has accused the Democratic HELP staff of substantially altering the HELP bill as the plan was translated into its final legislative text, which was sent to the Senate floor last month. According to Enzi spokesman Michael Mahaffey, “there are 75 separate instances where they unilaterally overturned committee votes and member agreements.” He told me last week that the Wyoming Senator was “outraged” by the alleged discrepancies and brought them to the attention of HELP’s Democratic leadership, but failed to get a real response to his concerns.

What are the differences between the bills, according to Enzi? For one, Enzi says that one amendment passed unanimously by the committee was gutted--a wellness measure that would allow private insurance companies to lower premiums up to 30 percent for participants who compiled with healthy lifestyle changes. Other provisions Enzi says have changed include a requirement of parental consent for minors to receive treatment at school health centers and a student loan provision that tied financial aid to work in underserved communities. Enzi’s staffers “went line-by-line” through the bill detailing all the changes, which the Republican side was never consulted about or informed of, according to Mahaffey. “No member of the Senate should have to request that a reported bill have the same provisions as the bill that was voted on in committee,” he wrote in an email. “That’s basic Senate rule and procedure, and it was violated.”

Well, I had thought the University of Maryland's whole porn saga from this spring--in which piety-minded state Sen. Andrew Harris vowed to withhold funding if the campus allowed the student union to screen the skin flick "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge"--ended when the school announced that the show would indeed go on. How wrong I was.

President Obama and his allies in Congress are doing everything they can to rally 60 senators behind health care reform. But, for one red-state senator, even 60 "yes" votes won't do. It has to be 65. "I think anything less than that would challenge its legitimacy," he said in late September. It's a ludicrously high standard for passage--the sort you'd expect from a Republican opponent. But this comment came from Democrat Ben Nelson.

Bill Frist, the heart transplant surgeon turned senator, didn't always distinguish himself as a man of principle when serving as Majority Leader from 2003 to 2007. Yes, that was him diagnosing Terry Schiavo's medical condition from the close proximity of the Senate floor.

But, like so many politicians, Frist was a complicated figure who also had what seemed (at least to me) like a genuine interest in public service--an interest that occasionally led him to stand up for what he thought was right.

Perhaps because he's out of politics again, that streak has shown itself again, in an interview about health care reform with Karen Tumulty.

Michelle's already flagged Ben Smith's Politico piece on the Andrew Young-John Edwards soap opera, but I just wanted to add my two cents--or, at the very least, get a blog post out of my one Andrew Young story.

With apologies to Winston Churchill, President Obama may not have presided over the beginning of the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last week in New York, but he seems finally to have marked the end of an embarrassing beginning to his Middle East diplomacy.

With the 2008 presidential campaign in full swing two summers ago, Joe Biden, then making his own bid for the White House, ridiculed Barack Obama on a momentous issue: Afghanistan. The occasion was an August 2007 speech by Obama outlining his plans to fight Al Qaeda, which included sending an influx of American troops and aid to the country. Later that day, Biden issued a snarky press release gloating about his own extensive record of pushing similar policies, and which cast Obama as a naïve newcomer. The release noted that the Delaware senator had co-authored the first law authorizing reconstruction aid to the country after the 2001 U.S. invasion and that Biden had recently been pushing both for more money and for more boots on the ground. "Biden Campaign Congratulates Sen. Obama for Johnny Come Lately Position," the release quipped.

As a senator, Chuck Robb was certainly a DLC-style Democrat, but never a wild-eyed hawk. Yet writing with two co-authors in the Washington Post today, he suggests that the U.S. might consider a sanctions-enforcing naval blockade on Iran by early next year. I would be surprised to see Barack Obama take such a step.

The Massachusetts house approves an interim Senator, and it looks like the state senate will follow suit. We could see a Senator Dukakis (or someone else, that much is still unsettled) by next week.

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

The disability community has played a puzzlingly small role in the health care debate. Advocacy groups have been active around the country and on Capitol Hill. Yet public perceptions have not caught up with the reality that each of the Senate and House bills now being considered would be hugely beneficial to Americans who live with physical or mental disabilities. Although word has (mostly) gotten out that there is no such thing as death panels, public conversation has failed to track what the leading bills would accomplish, and what they will probably leave undone, in addressing the particular needs of people living with chronic disabilities. (Lisa Iezzoni noted many of these issues in a Curbside Consult this week.)

Today, Family Voices, one of America’s leading advocacy groups for children and youth with special needs, has weighed in. Their statement is shown below. This group credibly speaks for a large proportion of families facing these medical, educational, economic, and social challenges.

I hope Senator Baucus and his colleagues read Family Voice’s statement. I also hope that they reconsider the poor protection they are providing against high out-of-pocket costs for many families facing serious medical challenges. Across America, there are parents arriving home from tertiary care hospitals carrying a very sick infant and facing a mailbox stuffed with huge medical bills.

A friend following Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee sends over this exchange between Mullen and John McCain, who asked the general about Carl Levin's proposal to prioritize training of Afghan security forces over U.S. troop increases:

MCCAIN: Is there any reasonable scenarios, Admiral—a prospect that trained Afghan security forces can handle the bulk of the fighting over the near to medium term?

MULLEN: No, sir.

The Missouri Senator on the public plan:

"He talked about handcuffing the public option, which is essential...for a moderate like me," she said. "Without handcuffing it, it could morph into a comprehensive government plan, which I think most moderates can't support."

Moderate!