Today, Explained - Republicans on the run

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

A landmark cap-and-trade bill in Oregon is on life support after Republicans fled the state to avoid voting on it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a presidential debate or two coming up, I'm told, and the SCIM wants to help you be prepared for it. They've got all the candidates' resumes and their priorities for 2020 in one place. That place is the SCIM.com slash debate. But guess what? Just a little twist. There's two M's in SCIM. S-K-I-M-M dot com slash debate. Lauren Dick, you cover politics for Oregon Public Broadcasting. Something very strange is happening in your state capitol right now. Could you tell us what exactly that is? Yeah, so the Oregon Senate Republicans here have actually fled our state and are apparently in Idaho or Montana or other states in order to avoid a vote on a pretty sweeping climate change bill. It's a cap and trade bill. The Republicans here, they're in the super minority, and it's really one of the only maneuvers that they have to gain leverage over the majority party. The state constitution here requires that 20 members be present to have a quorum on the Senate floor in order for them to do business. There are 18 Democrats, so they need two Republican members to show up in order to vote on bills.

This bill has long been a big Democratic priority. Republicans have voiced concerns about it for a long time. They felt like negotiations were not going well. So rather than vote on it, they have fled the state. Wow. Republicans on the run. Yes. We have avoided being within the state boundaries where the governor can exercise at her prerogative the state troopers to call us back to the state capitol. Meanwhile, Oregon's Democratic governor, Kate Brown, has authorized Oregon State police troopers to search for those now missing Republicans and bring them back. I think this is really important. We negotiated in good faith to bring Senate Republicans back.

And it was my expectation that they keep their word. I'm keeping mine. All right, well, let's walk through the chronology here. How the heck did this happen? When did this fight over a cap and trade bill that resulted in Republicans literally fleeing the state of Oregon get started? This has been a big Democratic priority for a long time. A lot of Democrats campaigned on getting this done. Then they had the supermajority in both chambers. So they thought, you know, it was definitely going to happen. Future generations will judge us not on the fact of global climate change, but what we've done to tackle it. And literally, these young people's futures and their children's futures hang in the balance. It's critically important that we take action and that we take action now. Republicans have been trying to make changes to the cap and trade bill from really the start of the legislative session, really before the session started.

Fundamentally, though, they just do not want this bill to pass. This is a carbon tax and it's the most inefficient, complicated and expensive way to address reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. So the bill made it to the House floor earlier this month. And then as it moved through the Senate, got closer to the Senate floor, negotiations broke down over there and the Republicans fled for Idaho. What's the plan with fleeing the state? I mean, that can't really be like a long-term plan, can it? No, I mean, I think the idea is that they are outside of the Oregon State Troopers' jurisdiction, so they can't be as easily compelled to come back to the state Senate.

Has anyone heard from these Republicans since they left town last week? Yes, they are talking. I am doing the work of my constituents by avoiding saddling all Oregonians with this horrid piece of legislation. One Senate Republican sent me a photo of a sunset over a lake from his cabin in Idaho. Why? Just to show that, you know, they're in no hurry. They're in this lovely spot. There was a great Wall Street Journal story that came out yesterday talking about how they've bought burner phones because they think that the Oregon State Police could track them using their cell phones. So they are texting. They're actually all over. I mean, the Senate

Republican who's in the cabin sending pictures of the nice lake that he's looking at to a bunch of different people. He was on Fox and Friends. OK, so you are you're on the run right now, kind of. Well, kind of hiding in plain sight. Right. People know what state you're in for the most part. But how long do you have to stay out of the state? Well, the session constitutionally ends June 30th at midnight. And so unless we can have an agreement, that's how long we'll be out.

So, yeah, they are getting a lot of attention. And the Senate Republican leader didn't want to give one reporter he spoke to his location, but the battery on his cell phone died. So he called using another Senate Republican's phone, but everybody knew where that Senate Republican was. So he sort of unwittingly gave away his location. So they're just really trying to figure out how to be on the run. Is it legal what they're doing? I mean, they're abdicating their responsibilities and they're getting paid to do it? The Senate Democrats are fining them $500 a day for every day that they're out of state.

And they're trying to also ensure that they don't get paid. And in the meantime, does that mean nothing can happen in Oregon legislatively? Yeah, you go to the Senate floor in the mornings, every morning they're gaveling in. The Senate Democrats are gaveling in to a half-empty room. Because we have 18. Everybody knows we need two more. And I don't think there's two more in the building. How do people in Oregon feel about this?

It's got to be kind of weird. Is this the first? Actually, Republicans walked out earlier in May. They staged a four-day walkout. Before that, it was very unusual that Republicans would walk out or that any party would walk out. In June 2001, House Democrats, including Kate Brown, staged a week. But yes, it's an unusual tactic. Oregonians are very split, like the state in general. We have a real urban-rural divide here. There are a lot of rural Oregonians who are supporting this.

Protesters gathered outside the state capitol again Sunday, opposing a sweeping cap-and-trade bill while supporting Senate Republicans on day four of the walkout. Rift this bill up and throw it away because it's useless. It's just real people, real families, just people that work hard every day and try and support their community and their families. And we just want to show our support. They're worried that it would raise fuel prices. They're worried that they would have to upgrade equipment that would cost a lot of money. And they're just worried that it would put them out of money. And they're just worried that it will put them out of work. Had things gotten sort of testy there? I mean, if Republicans would rather flee

the state than actually talk to their Democratic peers and come to some sort of consensus, I wonder how volatile the politics have become. Yeah, the rhetoric has really changed, we've seen recently. Well, I'm quotable. This is what I told the superintendent, send bachelors and come heavily armed. I'm not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It's just that simple. And this Saturday, there was actually a credible threat from the militia and the Oregon State Police recommended that the Capitol be closed down. What's the militia? What do they want? They're called the three percentcenters, and there's several chapters of them. They were involved in the Malheur Refuge standoff in Oregon that made national headlines a couple years ago, where the Bundys and militia members took over a about this, they offered to guard and protect the Oregon Senate Republicans as they left the state. They have said that they are in contact and working with the Senate Republicans.

The Senate Republicans, however, have said that they're actually not working with them. OK, Democrats win a supermajority. They've got a Democratic governor that cleared for takeoff on this cap and trade dream of theirs. Republicans flee the state rather than stay and vote against it, knowing they'll lose. They're currently in Idaho and elsewhere taking pictures of the sunset or whatever. Some militia guys are trying to get involved. Where does this leave the cap and trade bill? The cap and trade bill right now is certainly on shaky ground.

There is talk in the Senate about killing it just to get the Republicans to come back. They're just essentially running out the clock to the end of the legislative session because we are supposed to be adjourning at the end of this week. But if it fails, it would be a defeat for the Democrats here because they made passing the cap and trade program a central goal of the 2019 session. But the negotiations are ongoing and they are changing, you things changing every hour or so. We spoke with her this morning, and since then, the Senate president in Oregon, a guy named Peter Courtney, came out and said that this cap-and-trade bill will not pass.

And that just created even more confusion. No one seems completely sure if this is a maneuver to get Republicans back to the Senate to vote on stuff before the legislative session ends on Sunday, or if the state's Democrats are actually giving up on cap-and-trade for now. What's clear is that Republicans want nothing to do with cap-and-trade, which is funny because it was a Republican who introduced cap-and-trade to the United States to begin with. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, that's Next on Today Explained. How are you getting ready for the debates? I've heard the candidates are doing a lot of old debate watching.

They're doing some study sessions. I heard Biden's doing some push-ups. The Skim wants to help you prepare. They're saying to go to The Skim. That's 2ms.com slash debate. And boom, there you go. It says the road to 2020. There's lots of stars up at the top of the site.

It says Democratic primary debates, how to watch, what to know, who's running for the president. Except it says who's running for prez, the Republicans. It looks like it's Donald Trump and Bill Weld. Then it's who's running for prez, the Democrats. And, oh boy, there's a lot of them. There's some cute graphics going on. Let's click on one of them. Let's say Elizabeth Warren.

That takes you to Elizabeth Warren's pitch for 2020. The who, the resume, the elephant in the room. It's about her ancestry. The 2020 policies. Check that out. You got a whole lot of information there waiting for you at the skim with two m's dot com slash debate. Umair Irfan, you write about energy and the environment here at Vox. How would Oregon's proposed cap and trade bill work? What would it do? Well, it would set effectively the second statewide cap on greenhouse gas emissions in the country set in law.

Ever? Ever. Yes. The first was just last week, which was New York. The New York legislature has passed a sweeping bill that calls for the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions in the next 30 years. This is not only a first step, but it is a giant step. It's a national step. But California also had a mandate that was implemented via an executive order well ahead of both of those states. But that wasn't set in law. New York was set in law. And if Oregon gets this passed, they'll be the second state to do it by law. Okay. So in a system like this, essentially, we set a cap,

a finite amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are allowed to be emitted. Now, if you exceed that cap, you have to buy a credit. So if you're a coal power plant and you can't quite turn down enough, you can basically talk to your friend, the friendly neighborhood hydroelectric power generator, and say, if you're producing some extra credits, could we buy some of those and sort of offset what we're doing? And the idea is that over time those credits are going to get more and more expensive. And so you can only buy your way out of the problem for so long. Eventually, you're going to have to make meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases. But by doing this cap and trade scheme, it's designed to give a little bit of flexibility to some folks that are having a harder time than others in reducing their emissions. And in the fight to combat climate change, how important a tool is cap and trade?

A lot of economists would say that one of the primary things the sine qua non of fighting climate change is pricing greenhouse gas emissions. We have to create some sort of disincentive financially to pumping out carbon dioxide into the air. Cap and trade is one way of doing that. Another way of doing that is taxing carbon dioxide directly. But by attaching a price tag, you show the entire industry and the whole world that there is a negative externality that's being built into the price of the activity that you're undertaking, whether that's burning coal for electricity or burning gasoline to drive your car. Now, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. You would still need other kinds of policies to, say, boost renewable energy and other kinds of, you know, social policies to help people that might lose their jobs if, you know, the price of fossil fuel goes up and

coal miners are no longer financially viable. But definitely foundational to all of that is a price on carbon dioxide emissions, whether that's through a tax or a cap-and-trade scheme. Where did this idea even come from? I remember starting to hear about this during the Obama years a lot, but is it older than that? Oh, yeah. This is a market-based way of controlling pollution, and that should kind of hint at the fact that this is something supported by free marketers, people like Republicans. We've set an ambition, an ambitious reduction target.

And applying market forces will be the fastest, most cost-effective way to achieve it. One of the first implementations of cap-and-trade was actually with sulfur dioxide in the early 90s under the George Herbert Walker Bush administration. This was something done to control sulfur dioxide pollution, which was a main ingredient in acid rain. So we're allowing utilities to trade credits among themselves

for reductions they make to let them decide how to bring aggregate emissions down as cost-effectively as possible. And it actually turned out to be very effective. In pricing carbon dioxide, what we're doing is we're pushing the cost of climate change back onto the people that caused it in the first place and are best positioned to get rid of it. How much of a game-ch changer would this be for Oregon? Oregon is about 50-50 in terms of power generation, clean energy, and fossil fuels. It gets the majority of its electricity from hydroelectric power. And then on the clean energy side, it's a lot of wind and nuclear energy. But on the dirty side or on the fossil fuel heavy side, you know, that gets about 31 percent of its electricity from coal and about 16 percent from natural gas.

And so on balance, there's still a lot of fossil fuels that are out there that need to be curbed. And a lot of that could see price increases under a cap-and-trade scheme. And so the people that are dependent on fossil fuels or, you know, the fossil fuel generators, those utilities are less than pleased about this, as well as some of the folks who live in rural areas and depend more on things like trucking and diesel fuel and whatnot in order to do their work or to generate heat and power for their facilities. So there's potential this bill really hurts people

living out in the sticks? Well, the bill as structured has a lot of carve outs to try to mitigate the impact on individuals, specifically, you know, low income people to make sure that, you know, their electricity rates or heating rates don't go up too much. And on balance, you won't see too much of an increase in terms of things like, you know, gasoline prices and whatnot. The people that are going to be hit are going to be the bigger, you know, industrial polluters, the big companies, the steel mills, the manufacturing plants and the power plants. And eventually those costs are going to be passed out through the economy.

That's the fear is that ultimately, you know, the consumer will end up paying for it somehow. What's popular support like on this in Oregon? It's been fairly high. I mean, remember, Democrats won the last election. Some of them campaigned on this issue and they won super majorities. Democrats say that they're confident that if this bill were put on a ballot, if this was made a ballot measure, that they would still win. It's just that they want to get it through the legislature because they have a lot of momentum and they think that climate change is an urgent issue that demands action more quickly rather than slowly. So if this goes well in Oregon and in New York, which just passed this, what, last week you said? Yeah. Is there a chance that more states will reconsider cap and trade? Yeah. I mean, Oregon is kind of an interesting case because, you know, it's not New York and California. New York and California are very big states with large populations and huge economies. Oregon ranks 27th in population. It's 38th in greenhouse gas emissions. So if they can come up with a business

case that sort of makes sense for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that affects a smaller state, then a bunch of other smaller states could also see a viable business case. They could be laying the groundwork for states like Washington, for Idaho, for their neighbors, but also other states in the middle of the country as well. How long before a state like Texas does something like this? Texas does have a lot of momentum. They are the largest wind energy producer in the United States. What?

Yeah, the wind at night blows strong at height. Deep in the heart of Texas. I had no idea. The Windy State. Yeah, definitely. Sorry, Chicago. Yeah, that's unfortunate for them. But Texas also has a very large oil and gas sector, and they're pressing hard on both of those levers at the same time. So they need to deploy clean energy, and they're happy to do it, but they're not really ready to pump the brakes on fossil fuels just yet.

And there's a lot of political support behind them. It's a powerful and very wealthy industry in the state. Which do you think comes first, a state like Texas passing cap and trade or the federal government doing it for the whole country? That's a really interesting question. At the federal level, there's some momentum that's building.

We hear in Congress, we heard about the Green New Deal being sort of this set of principles that now every presidential candidate has to kind of answer for whether they agree with it or not. So certainly there's a lot of national momentum building. And we've seen this happen with other policies as well, where the federal policy kind of outpaces what happens at the states. So I do think that that's probably the likelier scenario, that the country as a whole in aggregate builds more momentum towards fighting climate change than some of the more fossil-heavy or

fossil-dependent states. And they may end up pulling them along with perhaps something like a national cap on greenhouse gases, some kind of national carbon tax, or other kind of mechanism that forces them to reckon with their greenhouse gas emissions. Thanks to the Skim for supporting the show today. That's Skim with two Ms, of course. Right now at the skim.com slash debate, you will find the things that you need to prepare yourself to watch the Democratic debates, which are on Wednesday and Thursday. Before you watch, skimm.com slash debate.