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Now that the House has passed the debt limit bill, it’s time for the Senate to take it up, and we’re reasonably certain it should get the bipartisan support it needs to pass and avoid a catastrophic default on the federal debt before the government runs out of borrowing ability on June 5. But before it passes, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) would like to suggest a small tweak: he plans to add an amendment to strip out an outrageously bad idea that’s included in the House version of the bill.
Things like work requirements for some recipients of SNAP benefits (and the elimination of those requirements for others) got most of the press, but the debt ceiling bill on the whole is a big win for Joe Biden. However, it also includes a nice fat gift for Sen. Joe Manchin (D?—Fossil Fuels), a provision that would fast-track finishing the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, completely overriding the normal approval processes that have so far held up the pipeline. Kaine doesn’t like that one bit, not only because we shouldn’t be approving any new fossil fuel infrastructure when the planet’s burning, but also because Mountain Valley depends on using eminent domain seizures of land for the pipeline. Kaine’s constituents in Appalachian Virginia would prefer to keep their land unsullied, to say nothing of the national forest and wetlands that also face destruction.
NPR explains that the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, which Manchin has pushed since it was proposed in 2014,
would stretch 303 miles, from West Virginia to North Carolina. But it would cut through the Jefferson National Forest and cross hundreds of waterways and wetlands — and legal battles have held up those crucial sections of the pipeline have been held up for years.
In an extraordinary move, the federal measure would also quash lawsuits against the pipeline project and send any new appeals to the D.C. Circuit rather than the Fourth Circuit, which has regional jurisdiction and which has blocked numerous permits.
In fact, the debt ceiling bill, the “Fiscal Responsibility Act,” actually devotes more pages to the pipeline project than to raising the debt limit, since increasing the amount the government can borrow is mostly a matter of saying “here’s the new upper limit” and then amending a bunch of existing statutory language. Stomping past all the permitting and legal issues for the pipeline is by contrast some heavy lifting. For more on just what a crappy deal the pipeline is for the environment and for the people whose interests will be ignored, see also this New York Times op-ed by environmental journalist Jonathan Mingle (gift link via Appalachian Voices on Twitter. Mingle also sums up his points in this Twitter thread.)
The Manchin Gas Hose project is paired in the bill with a very limited gesture at streamlining permitting for energy projects; it would require faster decisions on both clean and fossil fuel projects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). However, because time was of the essence, the debt ceiling bill punted on reforming the permitting process for building the large electric-transmission lines that are needed to enable the transition to clean energy.
Instead, the bill orders a two-year study of permitting reform, as the AP explains:
“We got a little done here, but we’ll need to get more done later,” White House budget director Shalanda Young, a key negotiator on the budget deal, told reporters this week. “We all have an interest to make sure these projects move faster.”
Elizabeth Gore, senior vice president for political affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, said “the deal makes it marginally easier to build clean energy projects but more needs to be done to accelerate this transition and protect communities from environmental harms.”
But back to Manchin’s Folly: Tim Kaine and his House colleague Jennifer McClellan (D-Virginia) want to see if they can remove the Manchin Enhancement from the bill, because what the hell does a pipeline to carry fracked natural gas have to do with paying America’s debts? (Kaine is also more than a little angry that the White House agreed to include Manchin’s pipeline without consulting him, seeing as how he represents a state on the receiving end of Manchin’s pet project. Senators get prickly about such things). Kaine explained his objections to the pipeline provision last night on MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight.”
Kaine told Wagner that the vote on an amendment wouldn’t slow down the debt ceiling process, since Republicans will be offering amendments too; if his amendment passes (a very big if, since it would need 60 votes to pass), he doesn’t believe anyone in the House would go to the mat to keep it. Ultimately, though, he just wants a vote on the amendment, and said he’d accept the results win or lose. We’re not going to see a default on the debt over Kaine’s amendment.
And for fuckssake, we’re certainly behind the idea of Joe Manchin’s Senate colleagues letting him know they don’t appreciate his efforts to hijack national priorities in the name of fossil fuels and his own reelection chances. The only real consolation here is that the overall Biden administration climate program will cut greenhouse gas emissions by orders of magnitude more than the carbon cost of Manchin’s stupid pipeline.
And of course, here I’ll close by reminding you to join us tomorrow for the Wonkette Book Club, where we’re reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 climate novel The Ministry for the Future (Wonkette gets a tiny cut of sales via that Amazon link). Our discussion tomorrow will cover chapters 31 through 50, although I should probably warn that our comments policy forbids any calls for the Children of Kali to go torpedoing any specific climate criminals’ houseboats.
[NPR / Politico / NYT (gift link)/ AP / The Ministry for the Future / Image: Screenshot, Democracy Now! on YouTube]
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