Labor, green groups join Democrats in attacking GOP ‘obstructionism’

Environmental groups and labor unions are jumping into the election-year messaging war with the same message as the Obama administration and congressional Democrats: Blame Senate Republicans for blocking climate and energy legislation.

“We have a Senate that functions more like the time of Cicero 2,100 years ago,” said Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America, in a conference call with reporters. 

 
{mosads}He and other labor and environmental groups announced the start Monday of a three-week nationwide bus tour promoting passage of climate and energy legislation as a way to lower the unemployment rate. The House has passed an economy-wide cap-and-trade bill but climate and energy legislation has languished in the Senate.
 
“The Republican leadership in the United States Senate wants to send the message to Americans of failure,” Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said on the call. “There must be some energy proposal that the Republican leadership favors. But they won’t even let the Senate vote on anything.”

“We pay them to vote, not to hide,” he added.
 
The number of filibusters this Congress has increased calls by some to review and possibly remove the filibuster rule in the Senate, allowing just a majority of senators to approve legislation instead of the 60 now needed to end debate.
 
Cohen said nothing is likely to get through the Senate until the rules are reexamined.
 
“I wouldn’t have high hopes of them passing much of anything before the election,” he said.
 
Moving legislation in a post-election lame-duck session is possible, or “they can adopt decent rules once they come back. Otherwise we go issue by issue and nothing changes,” Cohen said. “It could easily be fixed by a majority of the Senate once they come back in January.”
 
President Obama — in remarks today at ZBB Energy Corp. in Wisconsin — made his latest strike at Senate Republicans. He said there are those “in Washington who made the political calculation that it was better to stand on the sidelines than work as a team to help the American worker.” He noted opponents to bills providing small-business tax cuts, infrastructure spending and clean-energy projects.
 
BlueGreen Alliance Executive Director David Foster said the tour has a legislative, not a political, aim.
 
“We’re not appealing for candidates in particular to come to these events,” Foster said. Lawmakers may attend roundtables, rallies and other public events associated with the tour. “But this is not a political campaign,” Foster said.
 
Republicans have attacked Democrats for legislation that has gotten through this Congress, including healthcare reform, economic-stimulus legislation and financial reform. But they’ve also said Democrats are too happy to bring up other flawed versions of oil-spill, small-business and other legislation that the GOP says costs too much and fails to create jobs.
 
“Republicans are proud to protect Americans from a job-killing national energy tax,” said Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “And if special-interest groups want to tell Americans that we oppose the job-killing national energy tax, they certainly have that right.”
 
The bus tour — which starts at a local United Steelworkers union in Carson City, Calif. — will wind up in Richmond, Va., Sept. 3. It will stop at a local Laborers’ International Union office in Las Vegas later Monday, before making its way to New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New England and finally Virginia. Many details of these events are not yet available.