The effort to enact climate and energy legislation this year suffered a critical blow Saturday when Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), the key Republican proponent of the bill, said he was unwilling to move ahead because of Democrats' push for immigration reform.
The move forced the other two authors of the bill, Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), to cancel a news conference planned for Monday at which they would have unveiled the climate and energy plan they negotiated with Graham, the only Republican who had been participating in the discussions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Update: From the comments, Lieberman has put out a statement saying that he and Kerry plan to continue to push for a climate bill. (h/t mark louis)
In an interview today, Graham said he did not see how the Senate could pass a climate bill this year if Senate Democratic leaders and President Obama pushed for immigration reform, as they suggested they would last week.
"The political environment that we needed to have a chance [to pass the bill] has been completely destroyed" by the push for immigration reform, Graham said. "What was hard has become impossible. I don't mind doing hard things. I just don't want to do impossible and stupid things."
I've heard that Lindsay Graham is kind of like the Republican Lieberman in that what interests him most is not ideology, left or right, but getting a lot of attention. This may be just his latest ploy along those lines.
He said the same thing last month about health care:
From the New York Times, March 11, 2010:
Mr. Graham, in a statement, said he had told Mr. Obama "in no uncertain terms" that the immigration debate "could come to a halt for the year" if the president moved to pass health care legislation by a method known as reconciliation, which requires a majority of 51 senators instead of 60 and would in practice require no Republican votes.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
So, maybe it's just another bluff. But the next few weeks definitely promise to be interesting . . .