The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [19]
In sum, oil companies had no interest in building new refineries, could easily have afforded to build them even if they wanted to, and were in fact, instead of building or trying to build, closing down existing facilities. For all these reasons, and for many others, the core premise of the Barton bill—that costs associated with new source review were preventing the construction of oil refineries and therefore driving up fuel prices—was clearly absurd on its face. In its own way, even the Bush administration had itself admitted as much years before, when the EPA issued a report flatly denying a link between new source review and refining capacity.
“The NSR has not significantly impeded investment in…refineries,” the agency wrote in June 2002, in its “New Source Review: A Report to the President.”
Barton’s bill almost certainly had nothing to do with refineries at all. Clearly, this was about repealing new source review restrictions on other kinds of Clean Air–governed facilities.
New Orleans was still underwater, gas prices were still soaring, a mean winter for nearly a million displaced persons was just around the corner—and the first emergency response of America’s reigning political party is to help the very richest companies in the world get out of paying fines for dumping acid rain on Canada, whether or not they produced gasoline or heating fuel. That’s what this bill amounted to. It was an ingenious, inspired piece of cynical insider politics—and Barton was the perfect man for the job.
EVERYONE IN CONGRESS knows what the real job of most House members is: to carry water for their campaign donors. When you get $80,000 from Company X, you’re not being paid to vote your conscience. And while companies obviously seek the support of the rank-and-file House members, the giving strategy in this Congress had been honed to an exact science, one that mostly revolves around compensation of the really important members. There’s no better proof than the giving habits of certain campaign donors that the congressional apparatus has been manipulated to the point where it can now be controlled by a handful of key players.
To wit, when you’re looking at the process by which any bill gets passed into law, on the House side at least there are only a few people who really matter. Those people are the majority leader, the chairman of the relevant “committee of jurisdiction” (i.e., Energy and Commerce for the oil industry, Financial Services for Wall Street firms, etc.), the chairman of the Rules Committee, the chairs of the House-Senate conference committee, the House Speaker, and perhaps a few other members of the conference committee.
These people are important because this small group can essentially ram a bill into law all by themselves. If you control all of these seats, you control every space on the congressional Monopoly board within which the bill can be written or altered unilaterally.
There are four main way stations on the road to a bill’s passage. There’s the committee of jurisdiction, where the bill, after being introduced, goes through what’s called a markup process. In a markup, the committee decides what goes in the bill and what does not. The markup process is supervised by the committee chairman. Theoretically the markup process is put to a general vote by the committee, but in this Congress the reality is that the chairman puts in what he wants and chucks what he doesn’t want out the window.
He then sends the bill to the Rules Committee, where other House members from outside the committee—usually freaked-out minority members desperate to stop this or that criminally insane provision cleverly hidden in the committee version—have a chance to submit amendments to the bill. The Rules chairman tries not to laugh, somberly nukes every meaningful amendment request with a pained, regretful expression, and then takes the bill behind closed doors, where it can be rewritten (usually in the middle