If you’re wondering whether Team Obama will be led by substance or dogma, note these claims by likely Obama administration official Robert Sussman, which offer further evidence that Obama is behind (or at minimum a participant in) the Waxman-Markey challenge to Chairman John Dingell and his lieutenant, Richard Boucher. The latter two apparently are insufficiently moonbatty on global warming and, as rumor has it, the Air America Bailout called the “Fairness Doctrine.”

Sussman criticizes the draft Dingell-Boucher global-warming legislation in his op-ed, “A good start, but not good enough,” writing that “two aspects of the bill — the absence of allowance auctioning in the cap-and-trade program and weak emission reduction targets for 2020 — raise serious concerns and should not be the starting point for legislative action in the new Congress. In a departure from nearly all recent climate bills, Dingell and Boucher would not auction allowances to power plants and other covered emitters before 2026, when an auction would be triggered in the absence of congressional reauthorization.”

My copy of Dingell-Boucher reveals the following, none of which are constrained prior to 2026:

Sec. 730. Auctions.
Sec. 731. Auction proceeds.
Sec. 732. Auctioning allowances for other entities.

These provisions are part of one of the draft bill’s four options for distributing the booty, larded with details for auctioning the ration coupons. For example, “(1) FREQUENCY; FIRST AUCTION.—Auctions shall be held four times per year at regular intervals, with the first auction to be held no later than March 31, 2010.”

There are similar provisions, noted throughout the bill, offering pages and pages and pages of detail about conducting other auctions as early as January 1, 2013.

As I wrote before, I wish Waxman and Markey well in their challenge, because it would prompt the one thing the alarmists have desperately fought to avoid: an actual public discussion of the matter.