Word: congressed
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President Barack Obama loves to talk about the great promise of energy reform, but all it takes is one glance down Pennsylvania Avenue to get a sense of the pitfalls of such ambitious designs. That was especially clear on Tuesday, as Congress ran both hot and cold on legislation to fight global warming...
...lobbying were felt across the Capitol, where the Senate the same afternoon passed by an overwhelming margin an amendment resolving that any energy legislation should not increase electricity or gas prices. As it stands now, energy-price hikes are unavoidable under most of the climate-change plans swirling around Congress, including the draft introduced Tuesday by House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman and Representative Ed Markey, chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. (See the top 10 green stories...
...levels by the year 2020. The goals are even more ambitious than those in Obama's plan, which calls for only a 14% reduction in the same period - and that may well be the point. While it's hard to envision such a unabashedly liberal climate-change proposal passing Congress in the current climate, it could provide some much needed cover for the Administration by making its goals seem modest (and moderate) by comparison. (See a graphic on the global effects of climate change...
...same time, the Senate is also expected this week to consider other energy amendments to the budget resolution being crafted. The House version of the budget, which is just a rough, nonbinding blueprint for Congress' spending priorities in the coming fiscal year, includes a provision that would allow health-care legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes. Democrats have uniformly said they have no intention of piggybacking an energy bill in the same way, though the provision is sufficiently vague to allow for such a move. Just in case Democrats change their minds, an amendment...
...such sentiment is likely to fall on deaf ears in host countries, where unskilled foreign laborers not long ago were welcomed as useful contributors to economic development. The Malaysian Trade Union Congress (MTUC) once campaigned for the protection of migrants' rights. But now they too are sounding alarm bells about the threat illegal workers pose to ordinary wage-earning Malaysians. "Many remain in the country," says Rajasegaran Gopal, the MTUC's secretary general. "We have a foreign worker time bomb ticking away...