tea party

Is Jeb Too Green?

GOP Primary voters may think so.

At this point,  the GOP Presidential field looks like Jeb Bush versus Everyone Else.  (Of course, there’s a big fight over who get’s to play Everyone Else when this particular play opens in Iowa and New Hampshire.) It’s an open question whether Jeb will turn out to be too green for the average GOP primary voter. …

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Tea Party Support for Cutting Greenhouse Gases?

Surprising New Poll Results

The NY Times reports some very interesting poll results regarding climate change. The poll shows that Americans are more likely to support a candidate who favors action on climate change, less likely to favor a candidate who takes the “I am not a scientist” line, and much less likely to favor one who calls climate …

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Lightbulb Wars : The Saga Continues

Republicans win a largely symbolic victory for an obsolete technology.

Among the sleeper provisions of the new budget deal is a ban on enforcing federal lightbulb standards.  This is a great example of symbolic politics — it makes Tea Party Republicans happy, has limited practical effect, and makes little policy sense. Or to put it another way, the enforcement ban is a dumb thing to …

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The Tea Party, the GOP, and the Environment

According to a recent study, non-Tea Party members of the GOP are actually a bit closer to Democrats than to Tea Party members on environmental issues.  That creates a conundrum for the GOP.  More than half of Republicans support the Tea Party, and supporters tend to be more active than others.  Yet the Tea Party …

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Why is Each Sequel Worse Than the Last?

Some movie franchises last way too long: Friday the 13th, Rocky, Nightmare on Elm Street.  Each new film is worse than the last, and they’re all worse than the original, which wasn’t so great itself.  The GOP war on energy=efficient light bulbs has the same characteristic — you wish someone would just drive a stake through …

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Cruz, Fischer and Mourdock: Three Tea Party Senate Candidates Versus the Environment.

Tea Party candidates defeated less extreme conservatives in three GOP Senate nominating contests. Their environmental views are ultra-Right Wing. These candidates should be right on your wavelength — if you think that there’s a plan for U.N. world domination, that EPA should be gutted or abolished, and that climate change is a deliberate hoax by …

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Mitt Romney, Prisoner of the Tea Party

Just about any electoral map will tell you that Iowa is a swing state, and that Mitt Romney needs to win it if he hopes to capture the Presidency. Just about any political observer in Iowa will tell you that the wind energy tax credit, enacted as part of President Obama’s stimulus package (but with …

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Did the Founding Fathers Believe in a Strong Federal Government? You Betcha.

The whole point of the Constitution was to give the federal government more power.

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Ninth Circuit corrects itself on gold mining and the ESA

Cross-posted at CPRBlog. The en banc 9th Circuit issued its opinion Friday in Karuk Tribe v. US Forest Service. This opinion brings a welcome reversal of a panel opinion from last April which had ruled in a split decision that the Forest Service did not have to consult with the wildlife agencies before authorizing suction …

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Tea Party activist wants to repeal all California environmental laws

A number of other posts on Legal Planet have noted various efforts by Republicans in Congress to stop or repeal EPA regulations.  Those efforts are part of a broader movement by Tea Party organizations (organizations that are overwhelmingly Republican) to effectively eliminate environmental regulations in the United States.  If there was any doubt about that …

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