What the Georgia Senate wins do (and don't) mean for climate policy

[If you do not feel like reading today’s post, you can listen to it. Just hit play above.]

Y’all, before we get started today I have to share the funniest thing that’s ever happened.

You know how I went on MSNBC a few weeks ago to talk about how Joe Biden should do everything at once? And you know how former Saturday Night Live comedienne and all-around awesome person Leslie Jones frequently tapes herself watching MSNBC and commenting on people and their rooms? Well get a load of this:

Lol. It’s even funnier to read the comment thread beneath the tweet. Apparently I look like all the white bearded guys rolled into one.

Anyway. Good times. On to business!

I’m working on a longer post about electricity transmission (join the preliminary discussion), but the news cycle has intervened. To wit: on Tuesday, Democrats officially won both the Senate runoffs in Georgia. Joe Biden will have a Democratic Senate!

This news has Forest shaking with excitement.

So before we get to transmission, let’s talk about what these Senate wins mean, in general and specifically for clean-energy policy. I’ll end with a little bit of advice for the Democratic Congress, which is the same advice I gave Biden: go for it.

Control over the Senate matters

Democrats have 50 senators (well, 48 plus Independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King) and Vice President Harris casts the tie-breaking vote, so technically they have a majority in the Senate — albeit the slimmest possible majority.

But in the US Senate, the one-vote difference between being in the minority and being in the majority is a chasm. Just ask incoming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Most importantly, the Senate majority leader controls which bills come to the floor. McConnell was forever refusing to bring bills to a vote unless he had the entire GOP caucus behind him — even bills with enough bipartisan support to pass. It was an incredibly effective weapon to suppress and obscure the Democratic agenda. New Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will be able to control the tempo and focus now.

Secondly, Senate committees will now be chaired by Dems, who can choose what to hold hearings on, and when.

Thirdly, this is going to make it much easier for Biden to get his appointments confirmed by the Senate, which is a huge relief — those fights would have drained his attention and political capital. The day after the election, Biden announced that he would nominate Merrick Garland for attorney general. Ha ha, suck it, Mitch.

Fourthly, if Dems can maintain their unity (which is never a given), they can begin populating the federal bench with competent progressive judges to offset the incompetent reactionaries McConnell has been cranking out. And if Justice Stephen Breyer should choose to retire [makes the sign of the cross] they will have an opportunity to get a solid progressive on the Supreme Court.

Losing the Senate would have been a disaster for Dems. Congress would have passed nothing, leaving Biden virtually alone to accomplish everything his coalition needs to hang together in 2022 and 2024.

Instead they have a narrow majority in the Senate to match their increasingly narrow majority in the House. So it is a non-disaster. That said, it’s not going to lead to progressive legislation.

A 50-50 Senate will be owned & operated by Joe Manchin

Pre-November, Democrats were pretty high on election optimism — smoking some bad polls, as it turns out — and there was talk of a sweeping, New Deal-esque agenda, beginning with aggressive democracy reform and moving quickly into climate change. (Biden’s published plans constituted the most progressive agenda any Democratic presidential candidate has run on in decades.)

That was all premised on the idea of Democrats winning 52 or 53 seats in the Senate. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, even that wouldn’t have been nearly enough of a margin for Dems to pass the kind of agenda Biden ran on.

But with only 50 seats, Democrats will need unanimity for every move they make. Republicans will be united in obstructionism. It is what they know best; it is where they shine. There are only a few Republican senators who even pretend to be “moderate” any more — Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Mitt Romney (UT), basically — and even if one or two Republicans can be picked off for a given vote, that’s not enough to fully offset losing conservative Dems like Joe Manchin (WV, now chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and Jon Tester (MT), plus Independent Angus King (ME).

Basically, the rightmost handful of Dems in the Senate will be the narrow aperture through which all legislation must pass, and as such, they will have almost total veto power over every part of the agenda. They will decide what gets through.

Manchin does not want to pass Medicare for All or a Green New Deal. He doesn’t even want to pass Biden’s actual climate plan. He doesn’t want to do anything big at all, which he has made very clear:

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the most conservative member of his party in the Senate, has a message for fellow Democrats hoping to capture the majority and quickly begin muscling through legislation to bring about sweeping, liberal change: not on his watch.

Most importantly, Manchin doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster, and he’s not alone in that. Without 50 votes to scrap it, the filibuster stays, which means no major legislation will pass. No more Covid relief bills. No democracy reform bill. No climate bill. No health care bill. Nothing, period, full stop.

(I cannot stress the point enough: there is no significant legislation in the universe for which 10 Republican senators will cross over to vote with Dems, save perhaps defense spending authorization. Keeping the filibuster means deliberately taking major legislation off the table.)

That doesn’t mean there’s no hope for clean energy in the new Congress, though.

Opportunities for climate progress

I’ve already written about all the things Biden can do using executive authority alone. All of that is still on the table, though as we will see below, it is somewhat complicated by the Georgia development.

But what about Congress?

There is at least one place where Dems could get substantial clean energy legislation passed.

Budget reconciliation

I wrote a