I’ll be joining Larry Kudlow tonight on CNBC to discuss the political fallout of the Gulf oil spill and so will take a moment now to place my marker down (I’m assuming I’m the first to say this, because I haven’t seen this anywhere yet — not that I’ve searched, of course) and say that the spill could do what the collapse of the AGW scientific edifice, an outraged public, economic realities, and Europe’s disaster have all failed to do: Kill cap-and-trade for this Congress.
Remember, some piddling “offshore drilling” has been the Democrats’ boob-bait for months, trying to lure a “legacy”-obsessed or “I did ’something’”-type Republican to come on board by using a little “pro-energy” window dressing, while giving Dems political cover for reinstating moratoria on our ability to find hydrocarbons domestically (Obama already has done this from his end with his ersatz “opening up” announcement) even as they escalate the regulatory war against our ability to burn them. For a while there, it looked like it might even work.
The spill has already caused the weaker sisters to run from the notion of voting to support domestic production, as they were never really all that into it. Lawmakers willing to know so little about a scheme as to support it on the notion it would control temperature aren’t overly concerned with the issues themselves — let’s face it. And the quite-possible inability to get Republicans onto the cap-and-trade bill — making it that much harder to pull off the trick of calling it an energy bill — would be all she wrote.
But, again, this is their Power Grab. It’s not like the Left will just give up. On the other hand, given their understandable desire to avoid being saddled with sole responsibility for cap-and-trade, this might well be viewed, in hindsight, as what did them in.