Reality Strikes Back
On issue after issue, the White House and the Republican majority in Congress acts like they've either come to believe their own spin, or that by repeating their interpretation of events often enough, they can permanently refute facts on the ground. Thus we hear, again and again and again, that the occupation in Iraq is going splendidly well; that the cause of Social Security "reform" is making progress and resonating among the public; and that the jury is still out on global warming. Reports that the resistence is more active and deadly than ever, that two-thirds of the public resists the Bush agenda on Social Security (and mistrusts the president's "values" on the question), and that climate change is real and increasingly pernicious in effect, are dismissed as nothing more than fetishes of the "reality-based community."

But reality has a way of catching up with us. An increasing number of Congressional Republicans are publicly questioning the administration's interpretation of events in Iraq, and a difference-making number of them have already run away from the privatization of Social Security. Now, the Washington Post reports, the administration and its energy-industry allies might face a similar bipartisan revolt on the issue of emissions and climate change:

...the White House may soon be the last institution in Washington that doesn't believe that the threat of climate change requires something more than new adjectives. Next week, when the Senate is scheduled to begin debate on its new energy bill, more than one piece of climate change legislation may well be proposed as an amendment. For the first time, one of them may well pass. In the past, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) have proposed, but never got enough votes for, legislation establishing a mandatory cap-and-trade system that would allow companies to buy and sell the right to emit greenhouse gases, so that those who can cut their emissions the most cheaply do so first. Now, however, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), the ranking Democrat on the Energy Committee, has prepared -- in consultation with Republican colleagues -- an alternative amendment, one that would set up a cap-and-trade system, somewhat less rigorously, but far more cheaply, than the McCain-Lieberman bill. It is beginning to attract a surprisingly broad level of Democratic and Republican support.

This new legislation is based on a proposal put together by the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group that includes industry chief executives, environmentalists and scientists. According to a recent Energy Department analysis, that group's cap-and-trade system would cause only a minimal rise in electricity prices, and would not, unlike the McCain-Lieberman bill, lead to a sharp reduction in the use of coal. The legislation would also allow Congress to continually reassess the national cap on greenhouse gases, depending on what measures are being taken in other countries. Those two measures go a long way to answer those critics who claim addressing this issue in any way will render the U.S. economy uncompetitive.

In the final analysis, the White House and its enablers in the Republican congressional leadership will soon be reduced to one appeal in asking rank-and-file Republicans to defeat measures such as this McCain-Lieberman proposal or Bingaman's variant of it: this will weaken the president's prestige. Particularly during the last session of Congress, leading up to the presidential election in which their fortunes were largely tied to that of Bush, this line of thinking was persuasive. But with Bush never again to face the voters, Republican representatives and senators are looking at a different equation: should they vote with "reality" and on behalf of their constituents, or stick by their man and run the risk of facing the voters and a line of attack that argues their loyalties to the president supersede their duties to the public?