The GOP's New Strategy

To Fight Bill, GOP Turns on Business
By: Erika Lovley and Lisa Lerer
May 19, 2009 07:08 PM EST

Senate Republicans have come up with a novel way to fight the climate change bill working its way through the House: Tee off on Big Business, and tie it around the neck of the Democrats.

In a strategy memo obtained by POLITICO, Republican staffers for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works say Republicans should argue that Democrats are embracing “Wall Street traders,” “polluters” and “others in corporate America” who are “guilty of manipulating national climate policy to increase profits on the backs of consumers."

The Republican role-reversal may be counterintuitive — GOP candidates routinely describe themselves as “pro-business” — but Republicans say it reflects their party’s new reality.

“Business is not always going to be a good friend of the Republicans, and that needs to be reflected in our strategy,” said MWR Strategies President Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist. “The GOP business model is probably busted forever. It started to break apart on TARP, and it could permanently break apart on climate change.”

While the GOP tries to hold the line against a massive climate change bill, a number of major corporations — including Duke Energy, Johnson & Johnson and Shell Corp. — are backing cap-and-trade proposals by the United States Climate Action Partnership coalition, a group of environmental groups and businesses advocating legislation to reduce greenhouse gases.

U.S. CAP members include the Natural Resources Defense Council, General Electric, Ford Motor Company, and other environmental groups and Fortune 500 companies.

The GOP memo accuses USCAP members of “blatant rent-seeking.”

Democrats laughed off the harsh language Tuesday, saying it’s too late in the day to convince voters that Democrats — rather than Republicans — are in bed with Big Business.

“I find it extremely amusing that suddenly the Democrats are being attacked as being too friendly to business creation. I don’t get it,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “No one is going to believe that the Republicans are attacking us for creating jobs and new businesses. It doesn’t make sense.”

Added House Democratic aide: “The Party of ExxonMobil and Peabody coal cannot credibly convince the American public that they are the champions of small businesses and consumers.”

A climate change bill sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is expected to clear Waxman’s committee this week. A number of Republican leaders, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, have long argued that such cap-and-trade legislation would raise energy costs for consumers and do damage to an already fragile economy.

“House and Senate Republicans are clearly working together to develop the best strategy to defeat a national energy tax that will increase energy costs, raise taxes in the middle of a recession and drive good-paying jobs overseas,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). “The only constituency that’s important to us is ... the American people.”

The GOP memo focuses on the Democrats’ work with USCAP, calling the group a collection of “polluters” who are “writing significant portions of the Waxman-Markey bill.” There’s no dispute that the group has worked closely with the Democrats; a source who attended a committee markup on the climate change bill Tuesday said that Waxman’s staff had reserved a front-row seat for the group.

But USCAP spokeswoman Katie Mandes rejected the notion that her group is “big business,” saying that it has “several members that would be classified as small to medium businesses and five nongovernment organizations.”

“We are completely nonpartisan,” Mandes said. “We have pledged to work with Congress, the administration and with any and all stakeholders.”

Knowing they probably can’t stop the bill in the House, Republicans are doing what they can to slow its progress — and to make the process as painful as possible for vulnerable Democrats.

A slew of Republican amendments has delayed committee consideration of the bill. During five hours of markup Tuesday, members made it through only two amendments; Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said Republicans could offer about 400 amendments — 70 to 80 of which could require committee consideration.

Asked whether Waxman would be able to move the bill out of committee by Thursday — his self-imposed deadline — Barton said: “He’s dreaming. It ain’t gonna happen.”

Waxman said Tuesday that the committee would work late into the evening Tuesday, and again Wednesday, to get the bill done — and he hinted that he might start limiting the amount of time for debate on each amendment.

Barton has offered his own alternative to the Democrats’ bill, but supporters of the Waxman-Markey effort says his proposal contains the same sort of corporate giveaways the Republicans have accused the Democrats of providing.

“Joe Barton’s alternative energy bill is full of more handouts to big oil companies that made $650 billion in profits over the past eight years,” said Daniel J. Weiss, a climate director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Weiss said that the GOP effort to cast itself as “the party of consumers is as laughable as Bristol Palin advocating teenage abstinence.”

But this isn’t the first time that GOP and Big Business have split. During the recession in the early 1980s, Republicans and some industrial interests split over Democrats’ proposal to place tariffs on imported cars and other goods, according to the Heritage Foundation. And in recent months, Republicans voted against President Barack Obama’s economy stimulus plan and the release of additional Troubled Asset Relief Program funds, despite significant business support for both.

Kenneth P. Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said small business may be a better match for the GOP now because it will find “permitting and carbon regulations more burdensome than bigger businesses.”

“Big Business has no loyalty to any party — it exists to do its job and make a profit,” Green said. “I don’t see [the Republicans] going back to the party of Big Business. This could be a permanent breech.”

Good for the GOP. A winning strategy to be sure. The Libs have absolutely no room to wiggle out of this one.

Lib wealth indeed controls the culture. Super-rich foundations are using their wealth to change America’s culture. The Lib wealthy wants big government, multiculturalism, and a permissive cultural philosophy. There are foundations, in existence specifically to push the Libs internationalist agenda. This, of course, is at the expense of American sovereignty. “Charitable” groups have been in place, and, are being set up each day, that fund the Libs radical environmental and open borders strategy. The IRS, in recent years, has acquiescing to blatant partisan lobbying and outright dishonesty.

Tax-exempt (private) foundations morph into political organizations when they were originally created for charitable purposes. And again, they always gravitate to the Left.

The original donor intent, created by the founders of America's private tax-exempt foundations, was changed by their heirs and successors to the Lib, no-free enterprise agenda. Think the good intentioned founders of these foundations are spinning in their graves at what has happened to their altruistic foundations? I do. Libism, in recent times, has effectively infiltrated the media and educational system, so I'm not surprised the Libs have wormed their way into board and staff positions with these foundations, are you?

The Lib agenda has become extensive, anti-capitalist, and very anti-American. The largest, most radical of these entities, The Ford Foundation, placed heavy emphasis in its early days on funding pro-Communist groups, openly and without reservation. Today, The Ford Foundation, with equal openness and zero reservation, is blatantly funding radical Islamic groups in addition to supporting suicide (homicide) bombers. Unbelievably, even the ACLU rejected money from The Ford Foundation because of their obvious links to terrorism.

George Soros’ Open Society Institute is one of the originators and proponents of radical activities against the American way of life. The Soros' Open Borders foundation is behind the massive funding of propaganda for climate change. Open Borders uses its financial weight and elitist ideals to push a United Nations-style bureaucracy onto the United States in an attempt to control its economy in an effort to bring the United States down to the economic level of other countries in the world less fortunate. We're talking billions of dollars in funding. Specifically, Leftist billions of dollars.

It's the self-hating and wracked-with-guilt extra-rich Libs, like Laura Chasin, a third-generation Rockefeller that said, “It’s hard to get rid of the money in a way that does more good than harm. One of the ways is to subsidize people who are trying to change the system and get rid of people like us.” that push this agenda the hardest to the presidents and board members of these foundations that, feeling the same guilt, comply.

Now, Soros, who actually hates what the United States stands for, purposefully seeks to create and fund anti-American organizations, and supported Obama to the tune of millions in the last election because of their shared ideology. Soros infamously said the “main obstacle to a just and stable world is the United States.” This is the mindset of socialists and one-world government types. The president of The Ford Foundation believes we should "understand” radical Islam, instead of fighting and killing those radically fascist Islamists that mean to kill any Westerner, by any means, to the successful conclusion of their insane agenda. With the continued financial assistance of America's Lib elite and wealthy, these radical Islamofascist will succeed.

No doubt there is a shadow government within the United States controlled by the Lib elite super-rich foundations; controlling politicians, ignoring court decisions, ignoring donor intent, and moving full-steam-ahead with their "one world" agendas.

Yes, the Lib rich keep getting richer. You know, the ones that are super wealthy and pay very little in taxes, always insisting the hard working tax payer dish out to "feed the poor" while they continue to drive their limos and SUVs, play in the world's skies and waters with their fuel guzzling jets and yachts, and live their lavish "entitled" lifestyles. Oprah recently made mention of how very cool it is to own your own jet to travel here and there.

What about the Lib wealthy that always attend Gore's Global Warmongering events around the world? Globe-hopping in their jets from concert event to concert event just "to be seen" in the guise of supporting the effort? What about the hundreds of thousands of people that drove or flew to attend the event? How much fuel did that use; jets and cars? The vendors at the events? The pollution generated by those vendors to create the event-specific paraphernalia? How much of those "wealthy" emissions "count" as contributing to exactly that which Gore says he is fighting? It's really laughable that almost every point Gore made in his "Inconvenient Truth" has been irrefutably debunked. Yet, the Libs refuse to see and understand real science. They'd rather dole out their hard-earned bucks to their Gore-God's opinion to continue funding the Lib Lies so Al Gore (and those like him) continue their climb up the ladder of wealth. Indeed, the Lib rich keep getting richer.

When Libs wake up and finally smell the coffee, they're going to realize they've been had by precisely those that castigated them to be "better citizens" in an effort to take their money in fake carbon credits and home refurbishments that mean nothing; except more money in the wealthy Lib pockets.

All this, not to mention the elitist Lib media, for the past few years, publishing the plethora of faked photographs, using non-existent sources and quoting them as though they actually existed, creating faked documents on several occasions, even doctoring photos of Katie Couric in a feeble attempt to "pretty" her up, and outrageously furthering the careers of Lib journalists that blatantly lie and obfuscate the truth in the fervent desire to push the Lib agenda, the Lib media has intentionally and successfully twisted the minds of the general reading public into a pretzel of cyclic and bias thought.

Rational thinkers (those that think for themselves) are able to discern the deliberate Lib lies from the Truth and are not only be enraged by this typical and all-too-often ignored (and forgiven with a nod to continue) behavior which continues on a daily basis, but will never be suckered into the agenda-driven Lib hype the MSM feed the hobbled minds of the masses, either.

What happened to the days of serious reporting when a source was followed to the nth degree and words published had to be able to stand the scrutiny of any legal question? Simply doesn't exist anymore. Journalistic opinions (of politics or anything else) are now considered hard news by the (amoral) standards of the Left.

Last week, the New York Times admitted that during the last presidential campaign, it deliberately withheld a story about Obama's deep and personal involvement with ACORN in hopes the public would not become aware of his leanings toward the corrupt and, as Obama's numerous recent company takeovers prove, his dedication and favoritism to the unions and only the unions. As we all now know, the New York Times is just more big Lib business.