A Green Agenda for the New GOP Majority
The GOP may need to avoid the Dems' mistake of overreaching, but there are also pragmatic and popular green policies they can implement.
Senator Lamar Alexander told the New York Times’ David Brooks that he’s thinking of putting up pictures of Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman in the Republican cloakroom, as vivid reminders of the hazards of overreaching.
Good advice. Overreaching doesn’t pay, as Huck Finn once warned his readers.
Here’s some more gratuitous advice to the GOP leadership team. Be pragmatic, give businesses some certainty, and don’t go off on wild-eyed ideological excursions that have little to do with kitchen-table issues.
Some suggestions for the new House majority from over here in the green corner:
Extend tax breaks for energy efficiency and low-polluting energy technologies. Stop on-again, off-again rollercoaster rides with renewable energy tax credits that drive investors nuts and drive them off to China.
Kick the nuclear power revival up a notch. Give the industry the R&D and loan guarantees it’s been asking for. Give the program some time to work.
Don’t give the piñata treatment to the Environmental Protection Agency. Don’t undermine the Clean Air Act or let politics trump science. Don’t let a narrative develop that Republicans don’t care about public health. Remember that both EPA and the Clean Air Act are legacies of past Republican statesmanship.
Pass a few land protection bills that have broad local support, just to let the folks back home know that the party of conservatives can also conserve. Here’s a good one to start with: Congressman Darrell Issa’s Beauty Mountain and Tibia Act to protect more than 21,000 acres in Southern California as wilderness.
Talk of pragmatism and responsible governance might not sit well with Tea Partiers from the everyone-is-a-sellout-but-us school of politics. Listening to a Tea Party organizer wax triumphant in a radio interview, it was striking to hear how often she harrumphed in the name of “the people.”
The incoming Congress had better carry out the will of “the people,” she ordered. “The people” demand this. “The people” demand that.
As if “the people” were a monolithic bloc, like a gathering of Kim Jong Il’s acolytes in the DPRK. It all sounded way too similar to the kind of talk we heard from the New Left a generation ago.
The Tea Partiers are in danger of making the same mistake that President Obama’s swooning fans made two years ago – demanding that the politicians implement utopia immediately if not sooner. When reality shows that politicians put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else, disillusion sets in. Notice how many of the Obamaphiles who swarmed the polls in 2008 took a powder in 2010.
To their credit, the incoming GOP leadership team knows full well that Tuesday’s vote was not a ringing endorsement of a Republican revolution, but a probationary second chance for Republicans to manage federal affairs responsibly. They were awarded one house of Congress, not both, and two years, probably less, to show the voters that they can deliver the goods.
They can start by taking up Lamar Alexander’s suggestion and put up those Pelosi and Waxman reminders against hubris and arrogance.