Saturday, June 27, 2009

Pelosi's Energy Tax Passes 219 - 212   [Iain Murray]

The House came very close last night to delivering an historic defeat to the Pelosi-Obama agenda for bringing every activity under their control. After Minority Leader John Boehner displayed impressive leadership by taking over an hour to read out egregious examples of overreach from the 300-page amendment that no-one had had a chance to read (and I'll have more to say about that outrage later), 44 Democrats voted against passage of the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill. Ordinarily, this would have been enough to defeat the bill, but eight Republicans voted for the bill. They were:

Bono Mack (Calif.)
Castle (Del.)
Kirk (Ill.)
Lance (N.J.)
LoBiondo (N.J.)
McHugh (N.Y.)
Reichert (Wash.)
Smith (N.J.)

Without just four of these votes, the energy tax would have gone down and months of scheming by Henry Waxman and Speaker Pelosi would have been for naught. Two of them have hopes of a Senate run, I note.  Twitter users are already calling them the #capntr8tors...

06/27 09:38 AMShare