Washington politics: fractures in the landscape

It must be an interesting time to be a business lobbyist in Washington.  Not only has the political lineup changed along Pennsylvania Avenue, but now the fault lines among your friends along K Street seem to be shifting from day to day.

The US Chamber of Commerce, for instance, used to be able to count on pretty much everybody among their clients big and small to go along with the organization's position on climate science.  (It was, in a nutshell, a bunch of hooey.)

As recently as August 25, a senior Chamber official -- the man in charge of environmental policy --  called for a public hearing to put the science of climate change on trial, like the "monkey trial" of 1926 that ended in the conviction of a high school teacher for teaching the science of human evolution in Tennessee.  "It would be evolution versus creationism," William Kovacs told the Los Angeles Times.

Well, evidently this train of thought didn't resonate across the country quite the way Kovacs expected, and the lobbyist was quickly online calling his words "inappropriate." 

In the weeks since then, some major energy corporations -- Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Excelon and PNM Resources -- have quit the Chamber over the organization's position on climate change legislation, as has, most recently, Apple Inc.

This last defection prompted a letter from Chamber president Thomas Donohue chiding Apple for forfeiting "the opportunity to advance a 21st century approach to climate change."

Boy, even by Washington standards, the swing from proposing a "monkey trial" on the science of climate change to advocating "a 21st century approach" to the subject in just five weeks kind of takes your breath away.  Doesn't it?