By PEMA LEVY, Daily KOS, March 11, 2019

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democratic presidential candidate focused on climate change, argued Sunday that the Senate will have to abolish the filibuster in order to tackle the issue. “We’re not going to get anywhere as long as Mitch McConnell has the keys to the car,” he said during an interview at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

Whereas other Democratic candidates are not running for the White House as single-issue candidates, Inslee’s campaign prioritizes the existential threat of global warming. The “first and paramount duty of the next president has to be to tackle climate change,” he said on Sunday.

He warned that progress won’t be made unless the Senate removes the 60-vote threshold for passing legislation known as the filibuster, a long-standing procedural hurdle that requires 60 senators to agree to move legislation to a vote. Inslee, who noted he is the only 2020 candidate who supports ending the filibuster, called on other Democratic presidential contenders to join him.
There was some good news for Inslee in the new Des Moine Register poll out today.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who announced his run last week, also gets a boost. The percentage of those who view him favorably rose by 6 points to 17 percent, though he’s largely unknown. Seventy-five percent do not know enough about him to say whether they like him or not.
Climate Change was Iowa voters number two issue.

Eighty percent of poll respondents say candidates should spend “a lot” of time talking about climate change. Ninety-one percent say they prefer a candidate who supports the “Green New Deal,” which couples government programs to address climate change with support for jobs in the clean energy sector to help address poverty. That includes 65 percent who favor a candidate who supports the “Green New Deal” in full and 26 percent who favor approaching it in steps.

By Dino Grandoni, Washington Post, March 8, 2019

Temperatures aren’t just rising outside. They were also going up this week in the Senate as lawmakers from both parties squabbled over the Green New Deal.

In reality, that nonbinding resolution — it’s not an actual bill — calls for the United States to drive down climate-warming emissions over the next decade while addressing economic inequality.

But in practice, the proposal has become a Rorschach test for lawmakers. And a number of them have spoken at length on the Senate floor over the past few days to trade barbs when describing what they see in it.

For Democrats, especially those running for president, it’s a way of differentiating themselves from the GOP and demonstrating their seriousness in addressing what many young voters — a key Democratic demographic — see as the most important problem facing the country and world.

“Where is the Republican plan? What is their answer? Of course, they don’t have one,” said Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the chief Senate sponsor of the measure.

The Senate should be debating the science of climate change and the solutions of the #GreenNewDeal. Instead, Republicans are on the Senate floor right now repeating Koch Brothers misinformation and not offering a single solution of their own.

For Republicans, it’s a chance to paint their opponents as socialists trying to take away their hamburgers and ice cream all in the name of climate action.

“This is a massive shift,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said. “A shift to the left that goes far beyond anything that Democrats have proposed before.”

President Trump sees a political opportunity in talking about the Green New Deal. “I think it’s really something that they should promote,” he joked Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.

The only thing that Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on is that the Green New Deal is a good way of rallying their respective bases.

On the Senate floor, Republicans are accusing its supporters of trying to entirely eliminate certain sources of greenhouse gas emissions, such as cattle agriculture and air travel.

But the resolution itself mentions neither planes nor meat patties. Instead Republicans have latched onto a fact sheet accidentally published on the website of the main House sponsor, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), that contained a line about getting rid of “farting cows and airplanes.”

“To put it mildly, the Green New Deal is ambitious,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “To frame it more accurately, it is an unworkable pie-in-the-sky attempt to reshape every aspect of everyday Americans’ lives.”

Grassley added the resolution was “eerily reminiscent of the five-year plans of the former Soviet Union or the ‘Great Leap Forward’ under Chairman Mao of China.”

The elevated rhetoric from Republicans even had some Democrats who have not endorsed the Green New Deal perplexed.

“I just have to say that it’s pretty silly if it wasn’t so serious how the Republican majority and the Republican majority leader is mocking what is probably the most serious issue of our time,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said in her own floor speech that same day.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has told reporters he wants to hold a vote on the Green New Deal resolution in the “next couple of weeks.” His hope is to put Democrats on record on the plan he views as political toxic.

The Senate’s top Democrat, Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), responded with the party’s own set of resolutions, both to create a Senate committee on climate change and defund what Democrats deemed a “fake climate panel” being set up at the White House to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-more-we-learn-about-brexit-the-more-crooked-it-looks/2019/03/08/b011517c-411c-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html?utm_term=.1067ba398297