Mining The Data On Cap And Trade

Nate Silver crunches the numbers on climate change legislation in the Senate and finds 51 votes is easily done, plus the two Republicans from Maine (for 53) but 60 will be a definite problem due to the following red state Democratic Senators:

North Dakota, West Virginia and Louisiana rank 2nd through 4th in per-capita carbon emissions. Five of their six senators also happen to be Democrats. If the Democrats could swap, say, Rockefeller and Byrd for two seats in Arizona, the going would be significantly easier on this issue. Byrd in particular: let's face it -- it's not clear how many more votes Robert Byrd is going to cast in the Senate period, and at the end of the day, I don't see one of his final ones being something that could significantly impair the coal industry in West Virginia. The path of least resistance to 60 votes probably lies elsewhere. Rockefeller, though, voted aye on cloture on last year's bill and is probably attainable.

Mary Landireu and Byron Dorgan, on the other hand, voted 'no' on cloture last year. Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee and could perhaps be more vulnerable to peer pressure than certain other senators, but I don't know what you do with the more conservative Landireu, unless you can spin some offshore drilling compromise to her liking or persuade her of the linkage between global warming and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there's Ben Nelson, who's a problem for the Democrats on nearly everything, plus Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, who can probably expect a few late-night phone calls from Rahm Emanuel.

Seeing that Evan F'ckin Bayh actually has the most chance of voting yes on the bill by Nate's reckoning, that should disturb the hell out of you. Here's the thing though. Should Republicans try to filibuster the bill, it will have to be joined by the Democrats to actually prevent cloture, which means it will be the Dems that will kill cap and trade, not the Republicans.

If the modus operandi of the ConservaDems holds, they will threaten to kill the bill with a filibuster unless they get every single one of the concessions they want, ala the stimulus package in February, resulting in a crap bill.

When you see Republicans accuse the stimulus package of not working fast enough, remember when the largest concessions were made, and to whom they were made.