A very important week
by Eric Richard
By the end of this week, we may know the fact of Senate Bill 1419, the Renewable Fuels, Consumer Protection, and Energy Efficiency Act of 2007 .
Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee approved a set of proposed changed to the bill that will now go to the floor as an amendment. While the actual text of the changes have yet to be made public, a summary of the changes is available.
There is a lot to digest here, but from what I understand, a couple of conclusions can be drawn:
- There is a tremendous amount at stake in this bill
- Because of that, this is going to be a very bruising battle and the outcome is far from certain
It has been difficult to get many details on all of the political wrangling going on, but the little I have seen seems to indicate that horse trading is the name of the game today as senators try to work around potential filibusters.
Of course, if it makes it through the Senate, it then has to make it through the House as well, which has an equally challenging set of issues.
This one deserves some pretty close attention. If this bill is passed, I think it could be one of the most significant pieces of energy legislation in at least a decade.
I’ll be watching this one and let you know what I find.
on June 20th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Definitely one to watch, all right. I work for the Auto Alliance in DC, so we probably approach this issue from different perspectives. However, we’ve been supporting a bipartisan compromise amendment which would raise standards by 30% — that’s a lot, but it’s not crippling like the current version. The amendment is Pryor-Bond-Levin-Voinovich, and our chief spokesman was able to contribute a guest blog post making the case for it just the other day. Check it out if you get a chance.
on June 21st, 2007 at 6:53 am
Is there anywhere that one can get the text of the PBLV amendment? I have to say that I am mighty skeptical — the U.S. auto industry has a long, long way to come in my mind before I’d believe that they were proposing *real* change. Too many games have been played with the existing standards.
The comments on the blog that you linked to were also pretty negative on the amendment.
But I want to reserve judgment on the specific proposal until I could see it. Is the text available online anywhere?