And Pelosi, to her great credit, stood up to him. And she's right. It would have been all out war had Dingell tried to pass this crap. This happened last month, reportedly:
[John] Dingell (D-Mich.) [chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee] appeared in the speaker's conference room to walk through a bill that would override California's attempts to combat global warming by raising fuel efficiency standards, strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases and promote a controversial effort to turn coal into liquid fuel.
This time, Pelosi was in no mood to mollify Dingell. The bill he was sponsoring, she said, was unacceptable. The environmental costs would be too severe, the political costs for the Democratic caucus too high, she said.
We've written about Dingell before. The man is a shill for the auto industry, and couldn't give a damn about global warming or helping ween us from our dependency on oil. Maybe a Democrat who pushes Senator Inhofe's extreme loony-tunes agenda doesn't deserve to be a Democratic committee chair.
