Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.
Energy
Mitch McConnell’s Coal Conundrum
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Ben Geman
Mitch McConnell spent lots of time on the campaign trail vowing a frontal assault on President Obama’s executive moves to cut carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, which he calls a declaration of war on Kentucky’s coal industry. Now that McConnell has won and is on his way to being the Senate’s next majority leader, he has pledged he won’t force a government shutdown in upcoming battles over federal spending legislation. What’s the connection? Policy restrictions, or “riders,” on spending bills are the best way for members of Congress to thwart executive actions they dislike. So something has got to give. And the Kentucky Republican acknowledges in a new interview that nixing EPA’s rules via appropriations legislation is a heavy lift.
Senate GOP steeling for battle against EPA
THE HILL
Timothy Cama
Republican lawmakers are planning an all-out assault on Obama’s environmental agenda, including rules on mercury and other air toxics from power plants, limits on ground-level ozone that causes smog, mountaintop mining restrictions and the EPA’s attempt to redefine its jurisdiction over streams and ponds. The Interior Department is also in the crosshairs, with rules due to come soon on hydraulic fracturing on public land and protecting streams from mining waste.
Incoming GOP senator: Keystone votes are there
THE HILL
Mario Trujillo
Sen.-elect Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) on Sunday said President Obama would be smart to compromise on approving the Keystone XL pipeline. “I think he would be really smart to do it when he sees a margin in the Senate of probably 65 votes,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I would hope so. I mean if we are looking at jobs, if we are looking at infrastructure, we’ve got an energy growth in our country that we really need to capitalize on.”
Climate Tools Seek to Bend Nature’s Path
NEW YORK TIMES
Henry Fountain
The solution to global warming, Olaf Schuiling says, lies beneath our feet. For Dr. Schuiling, a retired geochemist, climate salvation would come in the form of olivine, a green-tinted mineral found in abundance around the world. When exposed to the elements, it slowly takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
China Has Refined Taste for Oil
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Abheek Bhattacharya
Yet even as China imported more crude, its refineries were converting it into diesel or fuel oil for re-export. Its net exports of refined oil products swelled to a record high in October, almost twice the level of the previous monthly record in July, says Citigroup ’s Ivan Szpakowski.
New Russia-China Deal Could Further Hit Natural-Gas Prices
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Eric Yep
A preliminary natural-gas deal between Russia and China signed over the weekend paves the way for opening up a second major gas supply conduit between the two countries and lowering natural-gas prices in Asia.
Technology
Tech’s lame duck to-do list: Internet taxes, STELA
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Kate Tummarello
The clock is already ticking on tech’s priorities for the lame-duck session. While the tech community will have to pay a lot of attention to happenings off the Hill — including President Barack Obama’s promised executive action on immigration and the FCC’s work on crafting new net neutrality rules — it is also homing in on its to-do list for Congress.
A New Agenda for Tech Freedom
WALL STREET JOURNAL
L. Gordon Crovitz
Until recently, it was bipartisan policy to keep technology companies free to innovate and to protect the Internet from government control at home and abroad. Perhaps one day these will again be bipartisan positions.
A Promising Approach to Internet Rules
NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial
A hybrid approach, if done right, could be promising. Ultimately, how well it would protect an open Internet and consumers would depend on the commission’s being willing to issue rules that limit the power of the broadband giants.
Communities Fight State Laws That Can Divide Broadband Access
NEW YORK TIMES
Edward Wyatt
In North Carolina, as in 18 other states, state laws limit municipalities from building or expanding high-speed Internet service networks. The reason behind those laws, supporters say, is to limit taxpayer exposure to projects that at times fail and for which there may be little demand. But Tom Wheeler, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, says providing access to broadband Internet is in the public interest. And for that reason, he says, the commission can override those state laws — setting off a heated debate about the federal commission’s authority over states and about whether local governments or private companies should provide the service.
The Stock Market Is on Edge About a Cable Merger
NEW YORK TIMES
Jeff Sommer
The debate over net neutrality and cable company concentration has been rattling Wall Street. This discomfort is evident in some unusual moves in the share prices of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the two cable giants that announced in February that they intended to merge in a $45 billion all-stock deal. While their adjusted prices should be converging — if you assume the merger will eventually be completed without major problems — the spread has actually widened strikingly since early September.
Finance
A Sure-Fire Way to Harm The Economy
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Reps. Brad Sherman and Peter King
Just as it seems the U.S. economy might be turning a corner, a little-known and seemingly benign change in accounting rules could cost millions of jobs and billions in lost economic growth. Most business owners and their employees have no idea what may be coming. The agencies that establish accounting standards in the U.S., Europe and Asia have a proposal, now gaining momentum, to change how companies present leased property and equipment on their financial statements. If it is implemented, the effect would be dramatic.
It’s time to work on America’s agenda
WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Elizabeth Warren
But the lobbyists’ agenda is not America’s agenda. Americans are deeply suspicious of trade deals negotiated in secret, with chief executives invited into the room while the workers whose jobs are on the line are locked outside. They have been burned enough times on tax deals that carefully protect the tender fannies of billionaires and big oil and other big political donors, while working families just get hammered. They are appalled by Wall Street banks that got taxpayer bailouts and now whine that the laws are too tough, even as they rake in billions in profits. If cutting deals means helping big corporations, Wall Street banks and the already-powerful, that isn’t a victory for the American people — it’s just another round of the same old rigged game.
The Fed’s bond buying enigma
WASHINGTON POST
Robert Samuelson
The Federal Reserve has ended its roughly $3.7 trillion program of bond buying, leaving in its wake a host of hard questions. Did it strengthen the economic recovery? If so, by how much? What are the long-run effects? Should it be used again? We don’t have good answers.
A chance for tax reform?
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
FOR YEARS, tax reform has been like Washington’s weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it. There is broad agreement that the Internal Revenue Code is an unfair, inefficient mess and that the solution is to lower marginal rates and apply them to a broader base of income. A simpler code, purged of its market-distorting loopholes, would foster economic equality and economic growth, both of which the United States desperately needs.
Financial Stability Board to Propose Stricter Capital Rules for Global Banks
NEW YORK TIMES
Jack Ewing
The Financial Stability Board, a panel made up of central bankers, finance officials and top regulators from the world’s largest economies, plans to announce proposals Monday that would double the amount of money that large banks would be required to have on hand to absorb losses.
Another Big Bank Handshake
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Regulators who keep assuring us about the end of too-big-to-fail are once again drawing a line around certain large institutions and applying rules solely for them. Well, not rules exactly—although the regulators say they’ll eventually write them to codify the weekend handshake. Taxpayer, beware.
Banks Behaving Badly, Again
NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial
This month, six big banks are expected to settle with British regulators over evidence that their traders routinely colluded to manipulate the foreign exchange market. But the settlement will not be the end of the inquiry. It will not cover all of the dozen or so banks that are being investigated; the six in line to settle — Barclays, Citigroup, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS — are simply those most willing to cut a deal. The settlement is also unlikely to resolve allegations arising from parallel investigations in the United States.
A Blank Page in the S.E.C. Rule Book, Four Years Later
NEW YORK TIMES
Gretchen Morgenson
It’s something that almost everyone can agree on: Executives should return compensation earned improperly as a result of accounting shenanigans at their companies. But four years after Congress told the Securities and Exchange Commission to write a rule making it easier to recover unearned pay, that rule remains unwritten. Compensation clawbacks, therefore, are all too rare.
Banking regulator warns of tougher cyber checks
THE HILL
Cory Bennett
Small banks and the networks that serve the financial industry can expect tougher cybersecurity tests, a key regulator told an industry conference on Friday. “While we won’t go into every provider, we will examine service providers that support a large number of banks and that could, therefore, pose a systemic risk to the financial sector,” said Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry, whose office helps oversee banking industry security.
Politics
Young guns vs. gavels
POLITICO
The Republican Party’s war within just opened a new front: Senate committees. As the party takes control of the Senate, establishment Republicans like Thad Cochran, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley and John McCain are about to pick up the chairman’s gavel, setting up a classic conflict between governing and campaigning with the party’s White House-aspiring young guns like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. On everything from foreign aid and military funding to how to undermine Obamacare, Republicans are just as likely to clash with each other as with President Barack Obama.
GOP Weighs How to Flex New Muscle
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Kristina Peterson and Siobhan Hughes
Lawmakers assembling this week for the first time since the GOP’s decisive midterm-election wins face their latest, looming budget challenge: keeping the government running after its funding expires in mid-December. Republicans won’t take control of the Senate until next year, but the lame-duck session before that will offer the first test of how assertive they will be in exercising their expanded leverage. Already new dynamics are on display, with Republicans warning that President Barack Obama would forgo any chances of cooperation by taking immigration steps on his own or pressing for an immediate vote on his attorney general nominee.
Obama vows to use executive action on immigration before new GOP Congress is sworn in
WASHINGTON TIMES
S.A. Miller
President Obama vowed Sunday to move forward with an executive order to ease immigration laws before the end of the year, ignoring dire warnings from Republican leaders that the move will poison his relationship with the next Congress.
Why the rush to a new attorney general?
WASHINGTON TIMES
Sen. Orrin Hatch
There is no reason to rig the process to minimize Senate scrutiny. We need only follow the example set during the last administration. President George W. Bush nominated a new attorney general days after the November 2004 election. His party controlled the Senate, but the Judiciary Committee did not hold a hearing until January 2005, when newly elected senators had taken office, including then-Sen. Barack Obama. Democrats today should follow the same process so that Americans can be confident that the rule of law is once again the Justice Department’s top priority.
Which Republican Party won the midterms?
WASHINGTON POST
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
GOP figures in the Senate such as Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Arizona’s Jeff Flake, bolstered by conservative intellectuals, are trying hard to create a new center-right space in the party. But they’re far from overcoming the larger forces at work. Until one party controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for more than two years, or the Republican Party as a whole feels more powerful incentives to reengage in negotiation and compromise, there is no reason to expect warfare to wane or governance to prevail.
Two midterm elections have hollowed out the Democratic Party
WASHINGTON POST
Dan Balz
The past two midterm elections have been cruel to Democrats, costing them control of the House and now the Senate, and producing a cumulative wipeout in the states. The 2010 and 2014 elections saw the defeat of younger politicians — some in office, others seeking it — who might have become national leaders.
Take politics out of selecting surgeon general
USA TODAY
Dr. Richard Carmona
The people don’t want a Democratic or Republican surgeon general, just as they don’t search for their personal physician by political affiliation. They want the most qualified physician. The remedy is returning to the tried-and-tested nomination of career uniformed service officers for the post. The job of surgeon general is to protect, promote and advance the health and safety of our nation and the world.
Obama Arrives in China on Trip With Complex Agenda
NEW YORK TIMES
Mark Landler
President Obama arrived here on Monday morning for a three-day visit that will capture the complexities of the United States-China relationship: the tensions of a rising power confronting an established one, as well as the promise that the world’s two largest economies could find common cause on issues like climate change.
