Numbers Adding Up Against Obama's "Cap and Trade" Bill in the Senate - Peter Roff (usnews.com)

It was hard for the Democrats to get the 219 votes they needed to pass the "cap and trade" climate change bill in the U.S. House two weeks ago. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, may have rolled the dice but, veteran Capitol Hillers say, it was only the intervention of President Barack Obama and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that managed to close the deal.

They did it by pitching the vote as a referendum, at least internally, on Obama's presidency rather than on the underlying issue. No president likes to lose, least of all on a signature issue like the need to combat climate change, so the White House ratcheted up the stakes and, one presumes, took down names.
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As Rasmussen says in his analysis, "It is quite common to find Americans more favorable toward new government proposals until a price tag is attached." And the price tag for the House-passed version of the cap and trade bill is quite hefty.

The American Spectator : Chris Horner  : They have issues

Now, this post also prompts me to remember a telephone call I received from a White House aide the night in December 2006 that incoming chair of the Senate Environment Committee Barbara Boxer supposedly broke it to Duke Energy's Jim Rogers that no, he shouldn't now expect a cap-n-tax bill to reward his loyal support with billions in rents. It seemed that the issue was too important to have against Bush, and for '08, according to San Francisco's own Ms. Boxer, who lives in a world where this issue is not a punch line.

She, apparently like the New York Times now, saw it as more important to have the issue than the law. The greens got wind of this, however - Rogers, so my caller said, was beside himself and ringing everyone in town he could in outrage, so it was hard not to get wind of it - and demanded what proved to be the Boxer-led disastrous vote last summer in which the bill had to be pulled from the floor in a matter of hours.
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So it may be that the Congressional Democrats, White House and their handmaidens at the NYT really believe that, outside their world, global warming tax just knocks ‘em dead (as the Times' Pauline Kael, possibly apocryphally, couldn't believe that Nixon won given that no one she knew voted for him). The evidence that I see tells me something different. Let's find out.