Guest Post: D.R. Tucker on the Perfect President

I’m fortunate again this week to have another guest post on a critical topic.

As we enter the election season, Climate Change looks like it will be, for the first time, front and center in the debate.
Bernie Sanders and Martin O”Malley have laid out strong stands on climate, and in the last week, Hillary Clinton, still the likely nominee, has made it clear she will be taking dead aim at the climate/science denial that poisons the contemporary GOP, not just challenging them, but ridiculing their stupidity.  So far, Republican candidates are just about defenseless on this issue, which polling shows has now become a new moral imperative for a majority of Americans.

In another post on this page you can see that Jeb Bush, (who some still consider the most likely GOP nominee, although he is currently trailing in polls) has been getting advised to try to triangulate on this issue, which may or may not help him in the early primaries.

Still, many on the left continue to make the perfect the enemy of the good, which brings to mind the oft heard maxim from the 2000 election, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Al Gore and George Bush.”
I hope we don’t make that mistake again…

D.R. Tucker:

Are critics of Hillary Clinton’s plan to address climate change ignoring its most important aspect?

Since the Democratic presidential candidate laid out her vision on climate in late-July, she’s taken some heat for not specifically indicating how she intends to deter development of dirty energy. The editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post faulted her for not endorsing a federal carbon tax, and 350.org’s Bill McKibben and former MSNBC host Ed Schultz noted that she has yet to come out foursquare against the Keystone XL pipeline.

Perhaps the most withering criticism has come from James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a man who has been consistently correct on climate for decades. In an interview for The Guardian, Hansen branded Clinton’s efforts on emissions “just plain silly,” further observing, “[Y]ou cannot solve the problem without a fundamental change, and that means you have to make the price of fossil fuels honest. Subsidizing solar panels is not going to solve the problem.”

Hansen went on to declare that in the United States, “We have two political parties, neither one of which is willing to face reality…Conservatives pretend it’s all a hoax, and liberals propose solutions that are non-solutions.” This criticism raises three questions:

First, if Hansen feels that this is indeed the case, then why not pair his call for federal carbon-pricing legislation with a direct call for climate activists to join the grassroots effort to amend the US Constitution to nullify the Citizens United decision, an effort that would presumably clear a path towards such carbon-pricing legislation? (Hansen has previously noted, “Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that”; nullifying Citizens United via a Constitutional amendment is the most effective way to do something about that.) Second, does Hansen really feel that Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s plan to move the United States away from fossil fuel completely by 2050 constitutes a “non-solution”? Third, isn’t there one aspect of a potential Clinton Administration that would indeed provide a solution to the climate crisis–that is, the appointment of pro-science judges to the Supreme Court, federal appeals courts, and federal district courts (assuming, of course, that a Senate inclined to confirm such pro-science judges is also elected in 2016, and retains power during Clinton’s term or terms)?

As Peter Montgomery noted in a July 30 Huffington Post piece:

“Journalist Paul Waldman argued recently that 2016 will be a Supreme Court election because right-wing voters will be motivated by anger over their losses on marriage and health care, even though ‘the Roberts Court has given conservatives an enormous amount to be happy about’ — gutting the Voting Rights Act and giving corporations and zillionaires the right to spend as much as they want to influence elections, and much more…

“Waldman says that, believe it or not, John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic president who had the chance to nominate a replacement for a conservative Supreme Court justice. Given the age of the justices, he says, ‘it would be strange if at least one or two didn’t retire in the next president’s term (the last three presidents each appointed two justices).’ [Therefore,] if progressives want to see a Court that vigorously protects the right to vote, that does not regularly bend the law in order to give more power to the already-powerful, that recognizes that the ‘equal’ in ‘Equal Protection’ means what it says, that does not regard the separation of church and state as some jurisprudential mistake, and that understands that Americans have a right to limit the corrosive influence of money on our elections, then they should make the Court an overriding issue for progressives in the 2016 elections. Those who see a very different role for the Supreme Court, and wish for a very different America, have already made the connection.”

Those who want a livable planet for themselves, their children and their grandchildren should also be mindful of the importance of the federal courts when it comes to climate and energy policy. After all, we wouldn’t even have a Clean Power Plan if the Supreme Court, in a 2007 5-4 decision known as Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, had not affirmed the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. As Montgomery and Waldman suggest, if a Republican becomes the 45th President of the United States, that Republican will attempt to pack the courts with far-right, anti-science ideologues. Five or six Scalias placed on the Supreme Court by President Trump, President Walker or President Bush would also be “game over for the climate.” (Even if, by some miracle, Lindsey “Why Don’t We Listen to the Scientists?” Graham were to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and the general election, he would find himself faced with unrelenting right-wing pressure to make the federal courts as wingnutty as possible.)

This happens to be a significant though unstated aspect of Clinton’s climate action plan–the power a President has to recommend reasonable men and women for the courts, subject to approval by the Senate. Clinton’s nominees to the Supreme Court, federal appeals courts and federal district courts won’t make rulings borne of fealty to a narrow ideology that refuses to recognize a federal role in addressing such issues as pollution.

Much of the criticism of Clinton stems from the idea that she isn’t a real progressive, that she’s a corporatist, that she plays pattycake with polluters. Of course, Bill Clinton was also attacked as a non-progressive corporatist back in the day, but he did give us Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. As for the issue of Clinton muting criticism of the fossil fuel industry because of ties to special interests, again, isn’t that an issue that can be remedied by limiting the influence of said special interests via a Constitutional amendment (a difficult goal to achieve, granted, but not an impossible one)?

Clinton’s climate and energy policy may indeed have flaws relative to Democratic rivals O’Malley and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but even a perfect climate and energy policy will go nowhere if the courts don’t uphold it. It’s possible that if Clinton continues to be criticized on climate, she’ll respond by explicitly pointing to the importance of the courts, and suggesting that the best climate policy involves making sure that judges who take science seriously are on the bench–and that a president who takes science seriously can nominate such judges.

D.R. Tucker is a Massachusetts-based freelance writer. He is a weekend contributor for the Washington Monthly, and has also written for BradBlog.com, Huffington Post, the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe Magazine, the Concord Monitor and FrumForum.com, among others. In addition, he hosted a Blog Talk Radio program, The Notes, from August 2009 to June, 2010, and served as a co-host of On the Green Front with Betsy Rosenberg on the Progressive Radio Network from August 2011 to March 2014. Currently, he is a contributor to the Climate Minute and Climate Notes podcasts for the Massachusetts Climate Action Network.