Hill Heat

From the beginning of her tenure, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has attempted to pass legislation cutting billions in tax breaks and royalty payments to oil and gas companies to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The legislation has died twice by a single vote in the Senate – in December as part of the energy bill (H.R. 6), and three weeks ago as part of the economic stimulus legislation (H.R. 5140).

House leadership announced plans to immediately reintroduce the legislation as a standalone bill, named the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008 (H.R. 5351).

Debate on the bill is now taking place, with a final vote scheduled for some time after 3 PM EST.

Update: HR 5351 passed by a roll call vote of 236-182. 17 Republicans joined the Democratic majority; 8 Democrats (Barrow, Boren, Cuellar, Gene Green, Lampson, Melancon, Ortiz, Rodriguez) voted against passage.

Following the one-vote failure on Wednesday of S. Amdt 3983 to H.R. 5140, the Senate stimulus package that contained $5.6 billion in “green” incentives, various environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, called Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for missing the vote.

On Thursday, the Sierra Club asked its members to call McCain’s office to ask “why he failed to show up for a vote that could have determined the future of green energy in America.”

Today, Executive Director Carl Pope blistered the office response to member calls in a blog post entitled John McCain Should Be Ashamed.

Immediately, people begin calling and emailing me, saying, “The Senator’s office says he voted for clean energy, and that your alert is wrong.” We check. He didn’t. We call his office. Stunningly, his staff has been coached to mislead callers. “That’s not true at all,” they say, “he voted for the bill yesterday.” Well, he voted, yesterday, but for a different bill. However we phrase the question, we get a lie. “No, if he had voted for the bill, it would not have passed. That was purely procedural.” But McCain’s staff knows that if cloture had been invoked, passage of the bill would then only require 51 votes, and the bill with clean energy would have passed. [Ed.- emphasis added.]

By a roll call vote of 58-41, Senate Democrats failed to muster the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster threatened by Republicans of the Senate’s version of the stimulus package (S. Amdt 3983 to H.R. 5140). The package differed from the House version by including:

• expanded tax-rebate eligibility for low-income seniors, disabled veterans and married couples
• a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits
• additional LI-HEAP funding
• $5.6 billion in renewable energy and energy efficiency incentives
• tax breaks for coal companies

This is the second time a renewal of the renewable production tax credits has failed by one vote in the Senate.

All Democrats, including Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who voted against the production-tax-credit package in the 2007 Energy Bill, voted for the Senate version (except for Sen. Reid, who cast a procedural vote against the package when it was evident cloture would fail).

Republican senators Collins, Snowe, Smith, Coleman, Grassley, Dole, and Domenici voted in favor of the package. All but Snowe (Maine) and Grassley (Iowa) are up for reelection this year, although Domenici has announced his intention to retire.

Sen. John McCain was the one senator not in attendance.

Friends of the Earth and David Roberts at Grist have singled out John McCain for the failure.