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The House race to watch

Now that the election is over there's one House race left to watch: Dingell v. Waxman.

John Dingell is the Ann Arbor/Detroit Rep who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee. He's also been fairly unabashed in his reluctance to moving climate policy forward, and E&C is the key House committee for climate policy. For those playing in climate and climate-energy policy, he's been the main bottleneck on moving policy forward within the Dem caucus in advance of January 2009. Considering the aggressive moves by other Congressional Dems, particularly Bingaman, Boxer and Markey, Dingell has been notably slow to the table.

Now, the always-aggressive Henry Waxman, #2 on the committee, has started a push to wrest the gavel from Dingell. The differences in philosophy and approach between the two men are quite clear, especially on climate. Dingell has been upfront about protecting the auto industry at all costs and being reluctant on carbon regulations (see for example), while Waxman is clearly itching to move forward on carbon caps.

The politics behind this will be fascinating as it is no secret that many Dems, including Ms. Pelosi, would like to see Dingell relinquish control of the committee and the attendant control it will have over climate policy in the coming term. Pelosi tried to go around Dingell in 2006 by creating an ad hoc committee on climate change (chaired by Markey), only to see Dingell win a fight that ensured the ad hoc commitee would have no legislation-writing authority. Apparently Dingell is taking this challenge so seriously that he's formed a "whip team" to help him fight off Waxman.

You can bet that savvy watchers of climate policy are watching this "race" more closely than anything else in DC right now. Ultimately, the ramifications of this fight will have serious and long-lasting implications for the direction and scope of thr country's first real foray into carbon regulations.