There’s something rather strange going up on Capitol Hill and worth noting during this political season: In order to clear the path of political resistance to Kyoto-style legislation, Greenwire reports how lawmakers are now warning of how “far the government could go with White House approval to start writing rules for regulating emissions for everything from power plants to cars, airplanes, restaurants, dry cleaners and bakeries.”

That is to say, members of Congress — who would love to claim the (substantively unsupportable) “I ‘did something’!” mantle, but have no desire to be associated with the price tag the a cap-and-trade “something” would bring – are using the threat of a McCain or Obama presidency as leverage to bring the regulated community to their knees and agree to legislation. Yet the evidence is piling up that GHG emissions reductions require “a planned economic recession.” (h/t to Roger Pielke Jr.) Hey, let’s have a conversation about that!

As a reminder, here’s the state of play. If left to its own devices, lawmakers accountable to the voters would continue to eschew taking the the emissions-limit leap, which is already proving so costly in Europe. Unfortunately for us, if to the delight of some in Congress, the courts and agencies are not going to leave it to elected policymakers.

However, the threat of EPA imposing GHG regulation – which the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA opinion clearly did not demand it do, though which EPA is clearly treating as a permission slip – changes things for the lawmakers.

Assuming that the next president will allow or even encourage this agency path, Congress will soon have the regulated community begging for cap-and-trade rationing but in return for some “regulatory certainty” (good luck!), some increased access to domestic energy supplies and cleaning up the “regulatory train wreck” as the current administration calls the looming mess. The latter requires certain things Congress actually is not able to deliver in the face of the shrill alarmist industry, like preemption of NEPA and ESA, as well as other state activism to set different limits. Regardless, that will only reveal itself late in the game, in my opinion, with the political process beyond any “fail safe” point of escape.

Neither candidate wanted to focus too much on this issue until elected. But now, with Sen. Obama clearly trying to use the Palin nomination to smoke out Sen. McCain and reaffirm his moonbattery on global warming – and thereby relighting his base’s suspicions and drawing the media to inquire about the conflict – I can’t think of a better way to finally have a debate about this issue. After all, we are collectively treating a major economic issue — one which would infect economic, energy, and foreign policy and which will surely be one of immediate urgency after the election – with an almost complete silence. The voters deserve better than that.