Senate Shelves "Cap and Trade"

Good news for taxpayers:

President Barack Obama’s push for quick action by Congress on climate change legislation suffered a setback on Thursday when the U.S. Senate committee leading the drive delayed work on the bill until September.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer said her self-imposed deadline of early August for finishing writing a bill to combat global warming has been put off until after Congress returns from a recess that ends in early September.

“We’ll do it as soon as we get back” from that break, Boxer told reporters. Asked if this delay jeopardizes chances the Senate will pass a bill this year, Boxer said, “Not a bit … we’ll be in (session) until Christmas, so I’m not worried about it.”

But Boxer did not guarantee Congress will be able to finish a bill and deliver it to Obama by December, when he plans to attend an international summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

I'm sure the "delay" had nothing to do with Democrat Robert Byrd's denunciation of "cap and trade" earlier this week:

“I cannot support the House bill in its present form,” Byrd said in a statement. “I continue to believe that clean coal can be a ‘green’ energy. Those of us who understand coal’s great potential in our quest for energy independence must continue to work diligently in shaping a climate bill that will ensure access to affordable energy for West Virginians.”

Senator Byrd’s was one of the two sponsors of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which the senate unanimously passed, 95–0, in 1997. Byrd-Hagel stated the sense of the Senate that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing nations as well as industrialized nations or “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.” Byrd-Hagel prevented Clinton from even trying to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which like the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” climate change legislation, would have put the U.S. economy at an economic disadvantage to China and India.

When things get shelved in the Senate, they have a way of sitting around and collecting dust for a very long time.

I can't help but wonder if Baron Hill feels good about sticking his neck out so far on this issue when it isn't even likely to get a vote in the Senate.

Isn't it curious that Baron Hill, who isn't normally politically courageous on anything, took a stand and that stand is to raise taxes on his own constituents, cost his own district jobs, and harm the economic well-being of countless Hoosiers and Hoosier businesses?

That's a rare sort of political liberalism, err, courage and it's courage Indiana can do without.