Senator Voinovich sent the following to his online newsletter on September 30th 2009:

Recently, Sen. Voinovich delivered remarks at the Managing Ohio’s Energy Future Climate Change Conference to discuss Ohio’s vital role in the national climate change debate. As a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) and the Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee, Sen. Voinovich has been at the forefront of the debate on climate change. He is committed to harmonizing our environmental, energy and economic needs, though he does not believe this should be done on the backs of working families. His vote against the Lieberman-Boxer climate bill last year helped save hundreds of thousands of Ohio jobs and protect Ohio seniors and families from sky-rocketing natural gas, electricity and gasoline costs. Sen. Voinovich believes the smart way to go about addressing this problem isn’t through unilateral actions that hurt our economy and drive jobs overseas. Americans are already struggling with increases in their cost of living due to higher prices for gasoline, home heating fuel, electricity, food and health care. Climate change must be addressed in a bipartisan way – it must incentivize the clean energy technologies we need now and in the future. Only through a collaborative, multinational effort can we develop and deploy the clean energy technologies necessary to solve this global problem.

This is old, but important.

Carl Pope:

The Senate is supposed to be debating global warming — the bill on the floor is the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. But yesterday the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to allow the Senate to debate the 491-page bill, demanding instead that the clerk READ IT OUT LOUD — a process that took NINE hours.

McConnell did not claim that members of the Senate were illiterate — he said he was just pissed off that the Democrats weren’t approving President Bush’s judicial nominees. (Can McConnell spell infantile?) But evidently it’s not really judges that got under McConnell’s skin. Last night Majority Leader Harry Reid read a much shorter (and more interesting) document out loud to the Senate — it was a leaked copy of a Republican leadership-strategy memo explaining that they had no intention of seriously legislating about climate change, but intended to use the floor time to score political points at the expense of the Democrats. The memo gleefully looked forward to a whole series of votes in which advocates of cleaning up global warming would be portrayed as plotting $8/gallon gasoline prices.