Pelosi end-runs Energy Chairman Dingell on global warming with Select Committee of her own

WP,pg1: Internal Rifts Cloud Democrats' Opportunity on Warming
By Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 23, 2007; Page A01


Rep. John D. Dingell, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, had expected to lead the debate over global warming -- until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed a new panel. (By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)

The House Democrats had not quite finished their "100 hours" agenda when they met in the Capitol basement Thursday morning, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) was already looking ahead. As her colleagues ate bagels and turkey sausage, she warned that their next challenge would be a lot tougher than popular issues such as student loans and ethics reforms. For her next act, she planned to take on global warming.

Democrats, she explained, had to show a sense of urgency about the carbon emissions that threaten the planet, and so she was creating a select committee on energy independence and climate change to communicate that urgency. The new committee, she said, would help the caucus speak with one voice -- even if it trampled the turf of existing committees....

Pelosi's power play demonstrated her seriousness about climate, a complex issue that may be as legislatively difficult and politically treacherous as health care was in the 1990s. But it also reflected her seriousness about imposing discipline on her caucus and preventing a return to the days when long-serving Democratic chairmen ran their committees as independent fiefdoms.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Dingell (Mich.) -- the longest-serving House member and a legendary defender of his committee's prerogatives as well as the carbon-emitting auto industry of his home state -- had made it clear that he expected to lead the party's global-warming debate in a rather leisurely fashion. Pelosi was end-running him....A few hours after Pelosi presented her plan to the caucus, Dingell convened the 31 Democrats on Energy and Commerce. Predictably, he saw Pelosi's new committee as a recipe for duplication, incompetence and the suppression of democracy.

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But Pelosi and her leadership team believe action will be good politics as well as policy, branding climate as a Democratic issue while showing the caucus that recalcitrant chairmen are no longer free to freelance. Pelosi had already warned Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) not to use the Judiciary Committee to try to impeach Bush, and she denied her rival Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) the gavel of the Intelligence Committee. Less than two hours after the mutinous Energy and Commerce meeting, she stood up to Dingell as well, holding a news conference to declare her select committee a done deal.

"It says to the American people, we are about the future," she said....

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