“Environmentalists went with an all-or-nothing strategy for the 111th Congress. Nothing won.”

And nothing usually does win in those types of battles in the United States Senate.  And maybe if the enviros last year had lowered their expectations and started working on half a loaf, we could have made some progress this year.  But whether that’s all the fault of enviros isn’t clear.  Some of it has to do with the poor functioning of the Senate today.  David Broder has an excellent discussion of this point in this morning’s WaPo under the heading, “The Senate, running on empty” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/04/AR2010080405451.html?sub=AR)

Broder blames a lack of Senate leadership, and maybe that’s true.  What’s clearly true is that compromise and conciliation — along with unanimous consent agreements — have historically been the lubricants that allow the Senate machine to function.  Unfortunately, this Senate on too many issues has seen an absence of those tools in favor of cloture filings, filibusters, and amendment-tree filling.

On energy and climate, various stakeholders had been saying for months that a complex, economy-wide cap and trade bill would not pass the Senate — due to opposition from most Republicans and some six to eight moderate Democrats.  As this became clear to nearly everyone, various thoughtful Senators — folks like Byron Dorgan, Lamar Alexander and Dick Lugar — put forward energy bills that would achieve significant greenhouse gas reductions and reduce our dependence on foreign oil without a complex cap and trade scheme.

Pieces of those bills could have been added to a simple spill bill to achieve some real progress on energy security and climate change.  And some pieces were added to a bill floated by the leadership.  The normal procedure in the good old days would then have been to secure a time agreement with provisions for considering amendments, get that approved by uanimous consent, and proceed to debate and voting.

Instead, with the Senate transformed into a partisan battleground, the leadership decided it couldn’t risk allowing politically appealing amendments on the floor – and then decided they wouldn’t take up the bill at all.

It’s unclear precisely when and why the Senate became dysfunctional, but largely dysfunctional it is.