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Energy
The Clean Power Plan Is Unconstitutional
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Laurence H. Tribe
To justify the Clean Power Plan, the EPA has brazenly rewritten the history of an obscure section of the 1970 Clean Air Act. The EPA cites Section 111 of the Clean Air Act as authority for its proposal. In reality, this part of the law expressly says that it may not be used to regulate power plants where, as is the case in this situation, those plants are already being regulated as Congress contemplated under another part of the law, Section 112—one involving hazardous pollutants.
Green Democrats to lead party in Hill committees
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Darren Goode
The GOP, which is taking over the Senate and will have its largest House majority since the Great Depression, is planning an assault on President Barack Obama’s climate regulations and an immediate push to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. But Democrats on the environment and energy committees will be a more uniformly liberal bunch in good position to make some noise on climate change.
Natural Gas: Abundance of Supply and Debate
NEW YORK TIMES
John Schwartz
Natural gas is the Rorschach test of energy policy. Depending on one’s point of view, it can be either an essential tool for meeting the challenge of climate change or another dirty fossil fuel that will speed the planet down the path to calamitous warming. President Obama is in the first camp. He sang the praises of natural gas in his State of the Union address in January, saying, “If extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.” But many environmental activists have denounced shale drilling because of the potential health risks that were cited by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York last week when he announced a ban on hydraulic fracturing in the state.
Shale and the Falling Price of Oil
NEW YORK TIMES
Joe Nocera
In the early years of the industry, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil controlled the price [of oil]. For decades before the formation of OPEC, the Railroad Commission of Texas (now the Texas Railroad Commission) would have a monthly meeting to set production quotas. More than anything else, the events of these past months, as oil has dropped and dropped again, shows that it is the market, rather than a cartel, that will dictate the price of oil for the foreseeable future. Hold onto your seatbelt.
Technology
Google has now ‘forgotten’ more than a quarter-million URLs
WASHINGTON POST
Nancy Scola
A European court’s so-called Right to Be Forgotten ruling in May has resulted in the scrubbing of hundreds of thousands of Google search results, according to data released by Google on Monday as part of its regular transparency reports on government requests for information removal. Google, it turns out, has agreed to about 40 percent of the requested URL removals that it has received in the months since the European Union’s Court of Justice issued its ruling that empowered citizens of the EU to have search results unlinked from their names online.
Senate Dems demand net neutrality protections
THE HILL
Ramsey Cox
Senate Democrats urged Republicans to “preserve net neutrality principles” in the 114th Congress. “To the extent that any Communications Act reforms are considered in the next Congress, those reforms must be fully consistent with and protective of net neutrality principle,” 11 senators wrote to the incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Were hackers behind North Korea outage?
POLITICO
David Perera and Joseph Marks
Dan Holden, a director at network defense firm Arbor Networks, which tracks Internet attacks around the world, says all the technical evidence shows that the North Korean outage was more likely a denial of service attack — an intentional network traffic jam orchestrated by hackers. “Much like a real-world strike from the U.S., you probably wouldn’t know about it until it was too late. This is not the modus operandi of any government work,” he wrote in a blog post.
Cyber Command investment ensures hackers targeting U.S. face retribution
WASHINGTON TIMES
Maggie Ybarra
In the shadows of the Sony hacking incident and North Korea’s massive Internet outage, the Pentagon has quietly built a multibillion-dollar cyberwarfare capability and trained its commanders to integrate these weapons into their battlefield plans.
Obama called the Sony hack an act of ‘cyber vandalism.’ He’s right.
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
Over the weekend, Republicans slammed President Obama for that they called a weak-kneed response to the North Korean hackers who are suspected of targeting Sony in a major data breach. In interviews with CNN and CBS, Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) called the hacking “a new form of warfare” and “terrorism,” respectively, and criticized the White House’s characterization of the incident as “cyber vandalism.” All this Washington hand-wringing over verbiage is more or less politically motivated. But the theatrics risk obscuring a key point: Like terrorism, cyber warfare has a specific military definition. Calling the intrusion into Sony’s network a definite act of cyber war not only makes it harder for the United States to distinguish between actual national security threats and inflated ones, but it also makes it harder for America to shape crucial international norms about how and when to use cyberweapons — norms that could help ward off the next North Korean hack.
Comcast-TWC Merger Review Delayed for Documents
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Shalini Ramachandran
Comcast Corp. ’s proposed $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable Inc. has run into another delay, this time due to the failure of Time Warner Cable to produce necessary documents to the Federal Communications Commission in a timely manner. In a Monday letter to the merging parties, FCC Media Bureau Chief William Lake said Time Warner Cable improperly withheld more than 7,000 documents “based on an inappropriate claim of attorney-client privilege,” something that came to the FCC’s attention this month. And last week, the FCC learned that TWC failed to send more than 31,000 documents to the commission due to a “vendor error.”
Finance
Yellen’s First Year at Fed: A Remarkably Steady Course
NEW YORK TIMES
Binyamin Appelbaum
As Ms. Yellen approaches her first anniversary atop the Fed, the course she is charting illustrates both her determination to make jobs more readily available — and the limits of that pursuit, which are to some extent self-imposed. Under her leadership, the central bank has effectively expanded its stimulus campaign. It has done so by standing still, leaving its plans unchanged even as unemployment has declined much more quickly than its officials had expected.
The FDIC’s Bank Holding Company Heist
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Paul H. Kupiec and Peter J. Wallison
Limited liability of shareholders is a basic principle of corporate law. Shareholders can suffer the complete loss of their investment in a corporation, but creditors of the corporation cannot sue shareholders to recover what they may have lost in a corporate bankruptcy. Yet to “protect” against future financial crises, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has proposed a new bank-resolution process that would upend this principle.
Politics
Labor’s big comeback
POLITICO
Timothy Noah
After a brutal battering in the midterms, organized labor will conclude 2014 with the wind at its back — thanks to two out-of-the-way corners of the Obama administration whose default posture in recent memory has been paralysis. The agencies in question are the National Labor Relations Board and the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. Both spent the past decade largely crippled by congressional obstruction, first from Democratic majorities and then from Republican ones. Now freed from those obstacles — at least for the moment — and operating under Democratic leadership impatient to make up for lost time, these agencies are promoting workers’ and unions’ rights more aggressively than Washington has witnessed in a generation.
Mitch McConnell’s New Senate Goal: Turn Republican Dial to Yes
NEW YORK TIMES
Carl Hulse
“One of my challenges is to try to convince some of my members that passing an appropriations bill is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Mr. McConnell said during an interview in which he looked ahead to assuming command of the Senate on Jan. 6. Mr. McConnell, who was instrumental in holding Republicans together against President Obama and Democratic initiatives, acknowledges that changing the mind-set of opposition he helped instill in his colleagues will be crucial to advancing legislation that will attract Democratic support and force Mr. Obama into difficult choices over whether to sign measures pushed by his adversaries. And that is why his focus will be lawmakers he thinks he can meld into a governing coalition.
House Republicans break ‘Pledge to America,’ allow rushed legislation
WASHINGTON TIMES
S.A. Miller
Republicans won the House in 2010 with their “Pledge to America” vowing a more transparent legislative process, but they broke many of those rules in this month’s end-of-year push to pass spending bills and a massive package of land deals. The Pledge committed House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, and fellow House Republicans to providing ample time for lawmakers to read bills and assured Americans that the party, if given the reins of power, wouldn’t cram unpopular measures into must-pass bills to sneak them through. But the $1.1 trillion spending bill, spanning 1,600 pages of legislative text and another 1,200 pages of explanation, was passed in just 48 hours.
Republicans Block Reappointment of CBO Chief Doug Elmendorf
BLOOMBERG
Dave Weigel
Incoming Republican leaders in Congress won’t reappoint Doug Elmendorf to another term as head of the Congressional Budget Office, according to a party aide briefed on the decision.
The end for Michael Grimm?
POLITICO
Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan
New York Rep. Michael Grimm has always been a survivor, so if he steps into a federal court in Brooklyn Tuesday and pleads guilty to a felony charge that he evaded taxes – as he is expected to do – it will likely be the beginning of the end for his brief, but spectacularly colorful, political career.
NASA Is Lost in Space
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sen. Tom Coburn
The U.S. exploration program needs a clear purpose, followed by the design and development of novel technology, rather than the other way around. What if NASA were directed to focus solely on getting Americans back to the moon, or developing a plan for humans to reach Mars? The resulting innovation would be tremendous for the nation, the aerospace industry and educational opportunities. Out-of-this-world spending wouldn’t be necessary. Funding for the ISS and SLS alone already totals more than $7 billion annually, similar to what the Apollo program spent every year on average. That money would be better used by working on clear, stated goals. Such steps are the only way to re-establish the American space program that was once the wonder of the world.
