Today’s Greenwire (subscription required) includes an edited transcript of an interview with Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that recalls Bill Clinton’s famous line, “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
Graham was at pains to explain his position on the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill. On the one hand, he asserted that, “I’m in this to win.” On the other hand, he pulled the rug out from under Kerry and Lieberman two weeks ago when he backed out at the last minute from a press conference at which the bill was to be unveiled, and he is not expected to join them when they introduce the bill next week. Sen. John Cronyn (R-TX) aptly described Graham as the hokey pokey man: “You put your right foot in. You take your right foot out. I’m not sure where he [Graham] is right now.”
Although the bill includes a cap-and-trade program for the electric power sector, which is to be extended over time to other sectors of the economy, Graham is still asserting that it’s neither a cap-and-trade bill nor a global warming bill. He stated: “It’s not a global warming bill to me. Because global warming as a reason to pass legislation doesn’t exist anymore.” He also explained: “There is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.”
Permit me to translate Graham’s Clintonese: “We want capntrade even if the original and central rationale is no longer credible, and oh, by the way, we’re not calling it capntrade anymore. I’m in this to win but I’ll be a no-show when Kerry and Lieberman introduce the non-global warming, non-capntrade, global warming-capntrade bill.”
“France today abandoned all plans to introduce a carbon fuel tax aimed at combating global warming,” the Daily Mail reports. The article continues:
The policy u-turn will be viewed as a huge disappointment to the green lobby around the world.
Many had hoped that if a major western economy like France took the lead in taxing harmful emissions, then other countries would follow suit.
But the scrapping of the tax plan was announced by Prime Minister Francois Fillon who said it could only be introduced across Europe so as to ‘avoid harming the competitiveness of French companies’.
He told a meeting of MPs in Parliament that the priority for the country was getting its stagnating economy working again following the international financial crisis.
Last year President Nicolas Sarkozy said a tax on the use of oil, gas and coal would make his country one of the greenest in the world.
It was provisionally set at pounds 15 per per tonne of emitted carbon dioxide (CO2), and would apply to homes as well as businesses.
Mr Sarkozy said money from the new tax – which would amount to some pounds 4billion a year – would be spent on green initiatives.
But there was stiff opposition from across the political spectrum, with critics saying the tax was just a ploy to boost ailing state finances.
In polls, two-thirds of French voters said they were opposed to the new levy, fearing they would struggle to pay higher bills. The government was forced to amend its proposals after they were rejected by the high court in December.
France has 44.4 million registered voters, and polls indicate that two-thirds are opposed to carbon taxes. Can 30 million Frenchmen (and women) be wrong?
The article concludes by noting that, “Mr Fillon told the meeting of MPs today that the government’s priorities were now ‘growth, jobs, competitiveness and fighting deficits’.” Now, if we could only get Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman to smell the coffee! They too would drop their proposal for “linked fees” (i.e. carbon taxes) like yesterday’s french fries.
President Obama recently gave his thumbs-up to an immigration compromise plan formulated by Chucky “Why Am I So Annoying” Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that includes a national biometric ID card for all Americans. I already outlined here some of the major objections to any national biometric ID but the government is moving forward with the plan anyway.
I expected this proposal to be terrifying, but I wasn’t prepared to be personally insulted. As was reported here:
“The cards would include biometric information designed to prevent counterfeiting — but the senators said the information would not be stored in a government database.”
I don’t believe in conspiracies, but when the government says they are going to set up a national biometric ID card BUT not store all of our information in a database, it smells fishy. Sure . . . (wink-wink) the national biometric ID won’t store our personal biological information in a government database . . . and our Social Security numbers will only be used to track our Social Security benefits, right? Nothing good has ever come about from the issuance of a national ID, let alone one that includes biometric information.
But the Senator’s statements, if true, negate the entire purpose of have a national biometric ID! If the information is not stored in a database, there is nothing to check your national biometric ID card against. That would make it incredibly easy to counterfeit. How is the government, or a private employer, supposed to know it’s a forgery? All national biometric ID cards, or ID cards of any type, require a central database of personal information to have a chance at being successful. What are Graham and Schumer thinking?
The good parts of the Senator’s plan, of which there are several, are totally overshadowed by this and the extension of an Electronic Employment Verification System (EEVS). These provisions have turned what could be an important bill into a terrifying extension of government power that won’t even cut down on illegal immigration. A bill like this that focuses on enforcement and amnesty only will not be successful.
Undocumented immigration is a problem but the solution is not scanning American’s biological information into a biometric national ID card that must be presented to employers and checked against a mandatory EEVS. The solution is to allow mass legal immigration to the United States to move immigration out of an unregulated black market and into the legal market. Americans are already punished by the government’s insistence that legal immigration be kept at artificially low levels; let’s not punish them more by submitting their most intimate information to a government database.
I have a piece in National Review Online today outlining the fantasy behind Sen. Lindsey Graham’s latest attempt to keep cap-and-trade alive. Here’s the beginning:
After declaring energy cap-and-trade “dead” in the Senate, the Left’s new favorite Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has been working hard to resurrect it under another name. Working with Senators Kerry (D., Mass.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.), along with lobbyists for the major electric utilities (and, err, Big Oil), Senator Graham appears to have come up with a new boondoggle that would institute a cap-and-trade scheme for utilities only, thereby creating a carbon cartel. The plan would impose a carbon “fee” on transportation fuels, driving up the price of gas, that would be rebated in the shape of funding for highway projects — which the Big Oil lobbyists appear to believe would help offset the rise in gas prices. All of this, of course, amounts to a new tax on energy, so Senator Graham and his cohorts are cloaking their smash-and-grab raid in the mantle of investment in “green jobs.”
Read the whole thing here.
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