CQ Politics | CQ Transcript: US Sen Minority leader McConnell: Still partially buying in to the greatest scientific fraud of all time?

BAIER: Speaking of the chances of passage in the Senate, the climate change bill just passed the House narrowly by seven votes on Friday. What are the chances it has in the Senate?

MCCONNELL: Well, I hope it won’t pass the Senate. The president himself said last year you’d -- it will lead to skyrocketing electricity increases. Think of it as a light switch tax.

I think the president’s right. I think it’s going to lead to significant increases in electricity across America in a -- in an effort to try to deal with a global problem.

If we do have a global warming problem, and many people believe we do, we need to target it on a global basis. The way to get at it is to build more nuclear power plants which don’t have a CO2 emission problem and to develop the kind of technology to burn coal cleanly.
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The French, for example, produce 85 percent of their power from nuclear plants. They don’t have a CO2 emission problem.
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NANCY PELOSI: Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs. Let’s vote for jobs. [Remember when this was all allegedly about saving our grandchildren from roasting in Co2-induced hellfire?]
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JOHN BOEHNER: This is the biggest job-killing bill that has ever been on the floor of the House of Representatives. Right here. This bill.
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HUME: Well, the margin in the House probably tells you nearly everything you need to know about the situation in the Senate. I mean, it barely passes the House, where you can ram things through much more easily than you can in the Senate.

No one is saying now that the votes are there to pass this in the Senate. And the time -- time is not on the side of the proponents of this measure. Alarm over climate change is diminishing. It has gone from fairly high on people’s list of priorities of things they’re concerned about well down the list, and I think it is continuing to sink.

The arguments of skeptics seem to be gaining momentum. So my sense about this bill is that it is in very deep trouble in the Senate and may not come to a vote.
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[Juan Williams] And in terms of the Senate, I would not bet against this bill, because I think the Republicans have no alternative. The Republicans aren’t saying, “Here’s the way that we can go about controlling carbon emissions.” No. They said, “We don’t have any plan. We just don’t like what President Obama is doing.”

It’s just becoming a refrain. And I think it’s damaging to Republican prospects when there’s no intellectual energy except to say, “We’re obstructionists.”