Republicans Highly Critical of House Energy Bill
On the Sunday morning talk shows, Republicans said the House legislation was doomed.
“This bill coming out of the House is going nowhere in the Senate,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on “NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “This idea of climate change is real, in my opinion, and the way you solve the problem is not you have some major tax on industry and private sector.”
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi said the legislation simply made energy more expensive. On “Fox News Sunday,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “Think of it as a light-switch tax.”
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the average American household would pay an additional $175 a year in energy costs by 2020 as a result of the provision, while the poorest households would receive rebates that would lower their annual energy costs by $40.
David Axelrod, the senior adviser to President Obama, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” said Republicans were trying to use inaction as a strategy to solve the nation’s energy problems. He also wondered aloud on NBC’s “Meet the Press” if the Republicans wanted to allow new energy jobs to go to other nations like China and India.
New York Times
6/27/9
Magnolia Tribune
