and it makes a difference when they hear from you. Uh, and uh, can I just say thanks for sending Kla Harris to the United States Senate to pardon that?Um, she's uh, she's she's uh, she's already making a huge difference. So, it does matter actually uh, that that you
by two Texas oil companies and that is a huge battle. The second battle is gonna unfold in the United States Senate when senators try to strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Remember back, I said in 2007, I thought the politics were shifting, that the debate was shifting from science to economics? One of the things that led me to believe that was the Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court of the United States held
It's sometimes down to 8 or 9 or 10 to 1. That means he's going to the United States Senate , the most elite club in the world with the support of 10% of the electorate in the state he's going to represent.
represent the platform that voters in Maine decided was Democratic primary voters in Maine decided was what they wanted to see represented in the United States Senate . Mhm. You You I I do think that like when I look at that main the video the Maine's Democratic Party put out last
I was working for, essentially, the Alliance of Justice was what it was called, but it was working with the trial lawyers and working in the United States Senate when, again, through providence, shall we say, my friend, who was a pretty talented state senator, decided that he was going to-- he called me.
Actually in 1948 Democratic Convention, Southerners walked out because Hubert Humphrey led an effort to get a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform. So he was the leading Civil Rights advocate the United States Senate , and he led a campaign to defeat the integration amendment. He was successful. He persuaded Northern liberals to vote against the integration amendment.
But it is if folks need evidence that this is going on, the evidence is all around us. And yet, the United States Senate , just about a week before that huge Greenland ice flow separated from the mainland, announced that it would not be debating comprehensive climate legislation, that it would not be even debating a measly 15% renewable energy standard, which
I didn't ever, in like a bar, I didn't ever think he would be the vice president-elect of the United States. The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election to the United States Senate
So Northern liberals campaigned against the integration amendment in order to preserve the Public Housing Act. They were led-- the campaign against the integration amendment was led by the leading civil rights advocate in the United States Senate , Hubert Humphrey. I don't know how much-- a lot of young people here.
Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. A lifelong political enthusiast, John was a page in the United States Senate under the sponsorship of Senator William Proxmire. He grew up in Bayfield, Wisconsin, and is a graduate of Wayland Academy, Carleton College, and Yale Law School.
'cause as I've mentioned I had chance to work with the Senate and the U.S. Navy, and some other organizations in D.C. And after one of my talks a guy came up to me who was head of the new policy for the United States Senate for the Democratic side of the Senate, and he said, "Dan, I have the perfect, simple picture back of the napkin story for you from politics." And he shared this picture and it goes back to 1974, so we're talking kind of ancient history now,
that's the good end of the spectrum and I promised you that I'd show you a bad end of the spectrum as well. So I wanna talk to you about an organization where I think communication doesn't work at all. Now I have had an opportunity to work with the United States Senate and a number of different governmental organizations. And the reality is people are incredibly smart, people are working very, very hard, but the problem is that often, because it's all about
with these doomsday arguments; arguing that so-called cap and tax, a national energy tax, would destroy their household budgets and destroy the economy and throw the mellow out of work. And the reality is that the cap that was being debated in the United States Senate would have imposed costs of roughly 70 to 140 dollars a year per household by 2030.
the politicians if they supported this. And so, these people were scared; I believe more of the politics than they were of the economics. And they realized, I think, how difficult this was gonna be in the summer of 2008, when the Lieberman-Warner bill crashed and burned in the United States Senate . They realized that again, in the summer of 2009, at the moment of the greatest success for the climate movement, when the Waxman-Markey bill passed the House of Representatives by a very narrow margin, but it did pass. The first time that
was not going to be driving a particular piece of legislation, even though what was being called the worst environmental disaster in American history gave him a perfect opportunity to do that. He felt that it was gonna be too hard. He felt that he had already asked the United States Senate to do enough; tap into their political capital with difficult votes for the stimulus bill and healthcare reform bill and the bailouts of the auto industry, etc. So, he wasn't willing to try again and so, when the President would have members
to the balance of power in the Senate, it could be a very close vote. That's incredibly important because the Senate has made it clear that it isn't gonna act on this issue anytime soon. So, what the Senate is saying is, "We wanna reserve the right to do nothing on this issue. We want the perogatives of power to be reserved for the United States Senate so that we cannot act." Ok, we wanna prevent the United States from doing this. Now this is an area where I know that President Obama is gonna be throwing his considerable might
It's one in which he faces another liberal but the conservatives put him over the top. So, if you ever wonder why he has that habit of mind and that sense of himself, as somebody who can do that, however impossible in the United States Senate , that's partly where it comes from. So he becomes the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, and the next morning there's a story in the New York Times, there's a story in various other newspapers,
of unique way, right? I mean, he was not your normal freshman Senator in a institution that basically prized seniority. He arrived as a global superstar because of the Convention speech in Denver. He was already getting hundreds of requests to speak every week the day that he walked in the United States Senate and was able to raise a huge amount of money for brother Democratics. He'd spent a lot of his campaign for Senate because by the time he won the nomination in Illinois, it was clear he was going to win the general election.