The Monkey Cage

I hesitate to say this, but I am not sure the Republicans are very much interested in policy at all. Yes, they prefer the status quo, but what they really care about is their re-election efforts. To this end they are opposing cap and trade not on policy grounds (partially because cap and trade is the market based compromise), but instead on marketing grounds. It allows them to defend the “American way of life” and oppose “dangerous change.”

To put Jason’s point another way the question is what you mean by the legitimacy or viability of the status quo - political, intellectual, ecological?

Good question. There are a few ways we could think about whether the status quo remains a legitimate option. One might be political in a public opinion sense: has the country reached a consensus that something needs to be done about greenhouse gases, thus making this a “winning” issue for the Democrats to continue pursuing until they achieve a new policy outcome. But another of thinking about it might be in terms of pure power politics: my sense from listening to Lisa Jackson this morning was that if nothing was done legislatively, the EPA now had the tools it its disposal (and support from the presidential administration) to move towards regulation without new legislative rules. We could also combine the two: the Democrats might feel they have both a mandate and the votes to do “something” about green house gases, and therefore are not going to stop until something has been done.

I would say that the second option—that you have your preference ordering wrong—is the correct one. I’d guess it more like this:

SQ > EPA > CATA > CPTD

The reasoning behind this is that I don’t think the Republicans care so much about the policy as the politics. While they probably prefer the SQ to anything, if we think they’re going for political gain, then EPA action is 2nd best for them. Why? Because they can blame it solely on Obama. This would be far more of an issue come his reelection if it was done by executive fiat as opposed to legislative compromise. Moreover, regulation by executive order is also the easiest to reverse if the Republicans come back to power. And if EPA regulation does (as they insist, and I doubt) put a damper on the economy, this could be the issue they need to unite as the party of responsible economics and come out of the desert in 2012.

I would think their third best option would be the carbon tax, also for electoral reasons. When properly implemented, a cap-and-trade program would effectively be a carbon tax, only with additional layers of obfuscation (and without the word “tax” in it). As such, they would rather the Democrats call it a tax and make it look like a tax, so that come 2010 or 2012, they can blame Democrats for raising taxes. What’s more, a carbon tax implies a carbon tax rate—and Republicans love to tweak tax rates. As such, they could promise to cut taxes in the next election, get that benefit, and do this without seeming too anti-environmentalist. In short, calling it a tax makes it seem less like an environmental program and more like a redistributive program, which is a much better election issue.

Finally, the worst option for Republicans would be cap and trade. For reasons mentioned above, it would be hard to use as a campaign issue, and hard to reverse by a simple shift in the White House. And because it’s a structured program rather than a simple tax, it’s less likely to be weakened over time—and ultimately, more likely to work.

News flash: the Republicans aren’t the ones “defeating” cap-and-trade. The Democrats defeated it themselves.

Of course, this doesn’t fit into your false left-right paradigm that says that there’s somehow a difference between the Republicrats and the Demopublicans.

More news: BOTH PARTIES ARE THE SAME. Wake up.

Cap-and-trade was doomed from the get-go. Obama knew it wouldn’t pass and so did everyone else. It was thrown out there to make people like you feel good. So that when it failed, it could be blamed on the GOP bogeyman and keep everyone mollified.

Meanwhile, we’re being marched into the slave pit.

How many banks were saved when GW gave $700+ billion to the corporate bankers? How about when Obama did it?

Wells Fargo took the money and bought out Wachovia. Chase took the money and bought out Washington Mutual. How’s your mortgage? Credit card debt? Student loans?

Stop looking at the Republicans as the source of all that’s wrong with D.C. and start looking at the POLITICIANS as the source of what’s wrong.

It occurs to me that the EPA route may be favorable because it allows for easier politicization in the future. Anything that Congress passed to deal with this issue would require some shift in Congress to get it repealed whereas a shift in the presidency could significantly hamper the EPA’s efforts from Day 1.