Cap & Trade Bill: Follow the Money

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, we have talked extensively here about the cap-and-trade bill and the fact that nobody read it, particularly the 300-page amendment that was dumped on the floor of the House at 3:09 a.m. Friday. Well, a member of the press has read it. His name is Edward Felker. Edward Felker has read the 300-page amendment. Let me give you this excerpt: ‘When House Democratic leaders were rounding up votes Friday for the massive climate-change bill, they paid special attention to their colleagues from Ohio who remained stubbornly undecided.’ The reason is that Ohio is a coal state.’ House leaders, Henry Waxman, ‘finally secured the vote of one Ohioan, veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, the old-fashioned way. They gave her what she wanted — a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state’s Bonneville Power Administration, stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.’

So they basically… They bought her off with $3.5 billion, folks. One vote! It cost $3.5 billion for her to turn her back on her state, in exchange for a pile of money that she can lead in handing out, which is going to guarantee her reelection for all of this mythical new energy technology. Now, here’s the bottom line. We talked about this earlier in this week. If there were profit in any of these alternative ‘green’ energy things, they’d be done right now. See, energy is… It’s hard to lose in the energy business unless you go into ‘green.’ There’s no market for it, it doesn’t work, and it’s too expensive. There is profit in energy because everybody needs it. Everybody needs gasoline. Everybody needs an air-conditioned or heated house. Everybody needs it. Every business needs it. Everybody needs it.

You cannot lose money in the energy business. So if the people who are in the private sector, the energy business… I mean, they want to make a profit, they want to serve customers and so forth. If there were a way to do it with all of this childish ‘green’ windmill solar stuff, it would be there, folks, and it isn’t. So how is it going to get into the market? It’s going to get in the market this way: they give Marcy Kaptur in Ohio $3.5 billion for her vote, and then she gets to pass out the cash. Let me read it to you again: ‘$3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.’ So, if Fred J. Schlub claims that he’s got a brilliant idea on doing some new thing with a windmill or solar power, all he’s gotta do is call up Marcy Kaptur and say, ‘I want some of the $3.5 billion.’

That’s not how inventions occur. That is not how innovation takes place. There’s not one innovation! I take it back. I take it back. Maybe I could name two or three innovations off top of my head that were government mandated. One, of course, is the nuclear bomb. The other is going to the moon. But essentially, the government does not sit there and decree, ‘Okay, you invent high-definition TV. You invent a car that does 70 miles an hour and it costs the same as a car…’ That’s not how it happens. So if they pay $3.5 billion for one vote from Marcy Kaptur, how much did it cost to get other recalcitrant members of Congress to go along with this? Henry Waxman included the Kaptur project — $3.5 billion that she can pass out to a bunch of schlubs who are going to be gaming the system, which is how the whole global warming thing got started, by the way. ‘You want a grant to study the whole science? Fine. You have to agree that man is causing the placenta to warm.’

Any time you take money from somebody — I don’t care if you borrow it or you accept it as a gift. Any time somebody gives you something, they’re going to want something for it. This is why when people say, ‘Rush, why don’t you run for office?’ I say, ‘I couldn’t do it, folks.’ I could not do it. I could not. I don’t want to be that obligated to people who make campaign contributions because they’re gonna want a payback somehow. They’re going to want an ambassadorship, or they’re gonna want to have dinner 14 nights a week. They’re going to want to do this and that. Or they’re going to demand something in policy or whatever. They’re gonna demand it be back. We saw this happen: these eight Republicans who voted for this abomination.

Why? ‘Cause they got a lot of campaign money from environmentalist wacko groups that traditionally give money to liberal Democrats. Money is the mother’s milk of politics. They were given huge donations from the environmentalist community and they had to pay it back with the vote. It’s maddeningly frustrating. So Waxman includes this Kaptur project, a 310-page amendment to the legislation that was dumped on everybody at three o’clock in the morning on Friday, which was just hours before the thing was scheduled to be voted on. And there were a bunch of other vote-getting provisions, large and small, that had been sought by dozens of wavering Democrats. So in a place of legislation that, again, we’re told we can’t do without…

‘We can’t delay this. It’s too important!’ Just like TARP, just like the Porkulus bill, ‘It’s too important. We can’t delay it.’ It’s nothing but earmarks. Think of it as nothing but a collection of millions of earmarks. That’s what these pieces of legislation are being, or ending up being — which is business as usual, by the way. The difference this time is nobody’s reading the legislation. They don’t care what’s in it. The aspects of the legislation that deal with the so-called issue at hand, in this case stimulus or global warming, are irrelevant. It’s the givebacks. It’s the earmarks. It’s the pork that secured the votes for all this. That’s why your phone calls weren’t listened to. That’s why outrage from constituents over this bill was ignored. Because it wasn’t about global climate change in the end.