Tom Steyer and his wife, "Kat" Taylor
Tom Steyer is a retired hedge fund manager, an environmental activist and a billionaire. The latter has allowed him to give millions of dollars to climate causes and to those candidates and legislators who support those interests.
Republicans are not happy.
what eye thynk: Republicans being unhappy with anyone who recognizes climate change as a scientific fact should not surprise anyone. It is the REASONING behind their unhappiness with Mr. Steyer that defies all logic.
It is a fact that Mr. Steyer has said he plans to give $100 million to support environmentally aware legislators and candidates for office. So far he and his wife have given $5 million to the Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC dedicated to ensuring that Democrats keep control of the Senate, in the hope that the scientific truth of climate change will have a fighting chance of being recognized.
Mr. Steyer also funds a super PAC of his own creation: NextGen Climate Action. The amount of money he has donated is easily traced since, unlike Republican money men who often choose to give their millions to political non-profits, (which we are expected to believe are "social welfare" organizations where disclosing donors is not required by law), Super PACS must release the names of their donors. To date, NextGen Climate Action has profited from Mr. Steyer's generosity to the tune of an additional $6 million.
When the bi-partisan energy efficiency bill failed in the Senate last week, despite initially having the overwhelming support of both parties, Republicans say that Mr. Steyer was largely at fault.
Their reasoning here is a bit obtuse.They want us to overlook the fact that, after tortuous compromises reached by both parties to get the bill into its final form, Republican Senators decided, at the last minute, that it still wasn't enough for them. They insisted that an amendment be added that would make approval of the Keystone XL pipeline MANDATORY. House Majority Leader Harry Reid refused, and rightfully so, saying that the GOP was essentially reneging on a deal they had spent weeks reaching. When the vote on the bill failed, Republicans claimed that it was the millions of dollars Mr. Steyer had spent lobbying Democrats against approving Keystone that had doomed the popular bill. The Republican last minute wrench-in-the-works amendment and the refusal of all but one Republican to vote in favor of the bill without the Keystone amendment had nothing to do with it.
Senate Republican leadership is now calling Mr. Steyer a "one-man special interest group" using his vast stores of money to halt environmental progress on the Senate floor.
Has someone stolen all the mirrors from the Republican side of the Capitol building? Taking into consideration the amount of money spent by the "TWO-man special interest group" (otherwise known as the Koch brothers) in lobbying Congress to block any new environmental regulations and to promote the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline, the Republican response to Mr. Steyer's activism is an awe-inspiring--and totally unself-aware--example of audacious bravado.
Republicans seem shocked by the fact that there is a billionaire who is not in their thrall, a money man who does not share their view of science as the domain of Satan, one who thinks that all Americans would be better served if businesses that pollute learned to live within some logical, earth-preserving boundaries.
While I would dearly love to see the Senate's energy efficiency bill get passed, (Senator Reid says it will be revisited), I can't think of a better reason for it to fail.
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