That Week On The Hill That Was

PRESENTED BY GHERKOMANCY

Today, Kauai is being battered by Hurricane Lowell, Big Weed is propping up MAGA, Lonnie Bunch is stepping down from the Smithsonian, and it’s primary day in New Hampshire and Rhode Island.

But What Happened That Week On The Hill That Was?

• Reps. Jared “All That Glisters Is Not” Golden (D-Maine) and Marie “Krazy” Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Ore.) cast the votes needed for the Republican rules package for the week’s floor votes on GOP priorities, without first informing Democratic leadership of their plans…

• …which allowed eight Democrats, including Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), to vote for the MAGA-pilled H.Res. 1490, a campaign-season resolution denouncing the Democratic Socialists of America and supporting Trump’s SAVE voter-suppression legislation…

• …and ten Democrats, including Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.), the presumptive Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, to vote for Golden’s bill H.R. 9436, to help the Maine lobster industry kill the remaining 380 North American right whales without doing anything to protect the Maine lobster industry from crashing…

• …and seven Democrats to vote for H.R. 1501, to fast-track domestic mining…

• …and 33 Democrats to vote for H.R. 4795, to help the Trump administration to force universities to collaborate with the genocidal Israel government…

• …meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation) announced that the House would be cancelling business for the last two weeks of September, and not returning until after the November election.

Now, let’s provide some context for That Week in the Hill That Was!

When Democrats took the House in 2018 during Trump I, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was consumed with a petty grudge match against freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the democratic socialist who knocked out an incumbent Democrat in a major upset and came in with grand ambitions for climate justice.

AOC and the Sunrise Movement were pushing for the formation of a Select Committee for the Green New Deal, with Sunrise activists staging sit-ins in Pelosi’s office. The hope was for a committee with the power to draft ambitious, economy-wide climate-justice legislation (but without final jurisdiction). Rules chair Jim McGovern and progressives like Ro Khanna, John Lewis, Deb Haaland, Joe Neguse, and Jared Huffman were supportive, but Natural Resources chair Raúl Grijalva, Energy and Commerce chair Frank Pallone and Ways and Mean chair Richard Neal opposed the intrusion onto their fiefdoms.

Pelosi hated AOC’s effrontery, and aggressively put her in her place, not only by mocking the “green dream or whatever” but by setting up a toothless “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis,” with the impressively mediocre swing-district Pelosi loyalist Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) as chair and AOC off the committee.

That’s the context for the present moment.

Castor was one of 86 Democrats who backed H.Con.Res. 58, a resolution condemning socialism, last November. This year, Florida Republicans redistricted Castor to be in an even more Trump-leaning district. So it’s no surprise that Castor was one of only eight Democrats to back the resolution denouncing the Democratic Socialists of America, right after AOC rejoined the organization.

There has been a remarkable boom in the Maine lobster catch since 1992. Was it global warming? Turns out, that although the oceans have been steadily heating, the first big change was a different human catastrophe: the effective extinction of Atlantic cod in 1992, thanks to catastrophic overfishing. Cod love(d) to eat baby lobsters in great number.

As Gwynn Gilford explained in 2022, the anthropogenic collapse of lobster predators coincided with the anthropogenic heating of the Atlantic Ocean, which fueled the Gulf of Maine lobster boom. The Maine lobster fishery has enjoyed several decades as an aquacultural miracle, where the artificial ocean conditions, along with the well-regulated deployment of thousands of lobster traps filled with Atlantic herring (whose stocks collapsed in 2019, oops!), raised tens of millions of lobsters to adulthood.

Now lobsters are fleeing the waters off the coast of Maine for the colder Canadian coast as carbon pollution relentlessly heats the ocean. It turns out that if your boom is thanks to global warming and fishing predators to extinction, the boom won't last!¹

Meanwhile, North American right whales are on the brink of extinction (there are about 380 alive) because of the warming seas and deaths caused by boat strikes and entanglement with fishing lines, such as lobster buoy lines.

The Biden administration stalled implementation of a carefully constructed program to protect the right whales without interfering with the Maine lobster industry, and keeping it stopped now has become Golden’s pet issue, since he’s not interested in fighting global warming or overfishing.

And that’s your Context For That Week On The Hill That Was!

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1  Also: no boom can last forever. Thanks, math!