Although the ratio of committee Democrats to Republicans is 12 to 7, under committee rules two Republicans must attend a markup in order to have a quorum.

“We’re not being unreasonable,” Inhofe said. “The only leverage we have is the quorum leverage, and if we get stonewalled, we’ll use it.”

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) plans to unveil a major global warming bill immediately after Congress returns from the August recess, she said today….

Boxer predicted she would have at least one Republican co-sponsor on her bill, though she would not name names.

This last piece of news is potentially huge. Democrats have started giving up hope for bipartisanship on health care — to the chagrin of Republicans — but because a number of conservative Democrats are unlikely to vote for a cap-and-trade bill, it will be necessary to bring a few Republicans on board, at least to break a filibuster. A Republican co-sponsor could give cover to moderate Republicans — and fence-sitting Democrats — to vote for cloture, even if they have concerns about the political impact of a “yes” vote in the final tally.

If there is a GOP co-sponsor, it will most likely be Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, the two moderates from Maine.

As Spencer wrote today, someone in the administration told ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn that yes, civil liberties groups support the idea of an order that “would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war.” That statement amazed the civil liberties groups that Spencer then spoke to. I’ve gotten similar reactions from civil liberties lawyers I’ve been speaking to since Friday as well.

But it turns out that there are some progressives, and some who’d even traditionally be called civil libertarians — though not representatives of the traditional civil liberties groups Spencer and I have spoken to — who have been floating the idea, but in a more limited way than the Post story suggested.

Specifically, a group of prominent military and criminal defense lawyers and academics on June 8 sent President Obama a letter urging him not to create a new system of preventive detention, but instead, to rely on the one we already have — with modifications, if necessary. Although they don’t specifically recommend an executive order, that’s the logical way for the administration to modify and clarify its authority.

“Our country can achieve its legitimate goals through existing laws which authorize the detention of those who should be detained in the fight against international terrorism,” says the letter, which I received just this afternoon. It’s signed by 11 prominent lawyers, including Retired Rear Admirals Donald Guter and John Hutson of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps; Abner Mikva, a former federal appellate court judge, University of Chicago law professor, White House counsel under President Bill Clinton and a mentor to president Obama; and Thomas Wilner, a prominent corporate defense lawyer who’s represented Guantanamo detainees in some of the landmark cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Longstanding law-of-war principles authorize the detention for the duration of armed hostilities of those who engage in armed conflict against the United States or its allies,” these experts write, adding: “Some modifications to the existing system may be warranted, but no new system is necessary.”

The letter specifically tries to steer President Obama away from proposing or supporting any new legislation that would create a new preventive detention authority.

Ken Gude at the influential Center for American Progress has also suggested that the president should clarify his authority of detention under the laws of war. In a recent memo he co-authored with Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, he and Martin write that the “ambiguities” left by the Bush administration over who is detainable under the laws of war “compound the lack of fundamental fairness in treating suspected criminals as combatants and holding them without trial.” Given how the detention authority has been used over the past eight years, “the new administration should now reassert the traditional understanding of the limits of the law of war and reject the former administration’s effort to read the word “organization” in the AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force] as effecting an unprecedented extension of the traditional understanding of the military’s extraordinary powers of detention during war.”

In an e-mail this afternoon that he sent from Paris, Gude says he never specifically proposed an executive order, but supports the idea and adamantly opposes new legislation.

Gude laid out his support publicly for a limited system of preventive detention, authorized by the laws of war which allow detention of combatants during a military conflict, on CAP’s site and in The Guardian.

Even David Cole, the normally staunch civil libertarian law professor at Georgetown, has argued that the administration has that authority, calling it “an appropriate and necessary means of dealing with enemy fighters during wartime.” (Cole was pilloried for taking that position by Kenneth Anderson in Opinio Juris, who asks, “if it’s sensible and legal now, why wasn’t it sensible and legal during the Bush years? Is this the same David Cole who appeared on panels with me over the last few years and who didn’t seem in those years to have any daylight between him and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, or Human Rights First on the principle of try-or-release?”)

Let’s set aside for now the very legitimate question of whether these progressive civil libertarians would have taken the same position during the Bush years, or if they just inherently trust President Obama to handle battlefield detention against a non-traditional enemy better than Bush did. The positions these people are taking is informed, at least, by what the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, although that case pertained only to the detention of Taliban fighters, while we were at war with Afghanistan. And it’s in line with what the federal courts have been ruling, with some variations, in a string of habeas corpus cases.

The proposal for an executive order to clarify the Obama administration’s position on the extent of its wartime authorities of preventive detention is very different, however, from the controverisal position that some more conservative lawyers and think-tank scholars like Jack Goldsmith, Benjamin Wittes and Neal Katyal (traditionally a moderate Democrat and now deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration) have been promoting. The Wittes proposal released on Friday with Brookings colleague Colleen Peppard, for example, would create an entirely new system of preventive detention that’s not limited to the president’s authority under the laws of war.

On Monday, Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ under President Bush, joined Wittes, a Brookings scholar, in a Washington Post op-ed to argue that a preventive detention scheme should be debated in Congress and spelled out clearly through legislation, not by the president by executive order. To them, an executive order would be “a nearly wholesale adoption of the Bush administration’s unilateral approach to detention.”

That, it seems, is where the current debate lies. Committed civil liberties advocates such as the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and others may still be arguing against a preventive detention scheme entirely, but given that the Obama administration has consistently argued its right to detain “combatants” (however they’re defined) during what it continues to call a “war” — not only in the Gitmo habeas cases but in regards to the detention of some 600 men imprisoned at the U.S. Air base in Bagram, Afghanistan — it’s impossible to imagine that the administration is going give up that authority in the future.

Although as Spencer pointed out, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs did say on Monday that the president is not considering issuing an order that “relies on legal theories that we have the inherent authority to detain people,” he certainly didn’t rule out basing a preventive detention system on some other authority — whether granted by the laws of war, or by an act of Congress.

I’ll be writing more soon about what that Congressional act might look like.

That’s not the only credit card development. The New York Times reports that issuers deluged by delinquencies are starting to cave, agreeing to cut balances in half, or more, for people who can’t pay their bills. Even the front-line customer services representatives — the ones who usually tell you they don’t have authority to do anything – now are getting the OK to make deals. Credit experts told The Times  “a line has been crossed.” Usually, card issuers might reduce interest rates, but not the actual balance. Anyone who has ever dealt with a credit card company knows the answer to any negotiation used to always be “no.” But with unemployment climbing, issuers apparently are willing to take whatever they can get, even if it means reducing a borrower’s balance.

Calculated Risk comments that in a financially literate world, people would pay their balances in full each month. There are lots of reasons why that doesn’t happen, from legitimate financial hardship  to poor choices. That’s why I’m not sure the move by issuers to wipe away debt is necessarily good news for consumers.

It’s true that borrowers shouldn’t be stuck paying off balances bloated by unnecessary and unfair fees. The card companies should rightly take a hit for some of those practices. Lesson learned.

But what’s the lesson here for some borrowers? Not everyone is a victim of financial hardship. No doubt you know more than a few friends who ran up big balances, buying things they really didn’t need or couldn’t afford in the first place. Now that times are tough, it’s possible some might get their debt sharply reduced. And what will they take away from the experience? That you can run up big debts and still find a way to get out of them?

Credit card issuers are often an easy target, thanks to some of their more egregious lending decisions. But borrowers aren’t always victims, either. The ones facing hard times and really need it may get a break. So will those who still cling to the easy money mentality that helped get the economy into this mess in the first place.

A study from two professors at New York University and Temple University released yesterday shows that people’s opinions on global warming are directly related to deviations from average temperatures. In other words, when it’s unusually hot out, people are more likely to believe that climate change is real.

Take a look at this chart, which shows that for each three degrees of deviation above normal temperatures, Americans are one percent more likely to agree that there is “solid evidence” of global warming:

In fact, the weather is one of the leading indicators of a person’s global warming beliefs, ranking below gender but above race, education and age:

And here’s a full breakdown of the demographics whose global warming views are most and least influenced by changes in temperature:

This winter, a record-high 16 percent of Americans told Gallup that global warming would never occur. But given that we appear to be headed for a hot summer, we might expect to see an upswing in climate change concerns in the coming months.

(H/T The Vine.)

The Times has caught wind of some of the details of the bill, drafted by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.). The legislation encompasses cap-and-trade, a national renewable electricity standard, a renewable energy standard and a low-carbon fuel standard.

On cap-and-trade, the bill sets the same goal as President Obama’s budget proposal for carbon emissions reduction by 2050: an 83 percent decrease. But the target for 2020 is more ambitious, aiming for a 20 percent cut from 2005 levels, compared with Obama’s 14 percent. Markey and Waxman also want a 42 percent reduction by 2030; Obama did not set a target for that year.

The renewable energy measure will call for utilities to get 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, by 2025, and up to one-fifth of this quota can be met with energy efficiency improvements. The bill will also require power utilities to improve their efficiency by 15 percent by 2020; for gas distributors, the requirement will be ten percent. Additionally, the legislation calls for a higher proportion of biofuels in the country’s fuel mix.

Overall, the bill sets broader and more stringent goals than Obama’s proposal, though the differences are relatively minor. Waxman and Markey’s legislation is also slightly more ambitious than a proposal outlined by the United States Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of environmental and business groups. The USCAP proposal called for a 14 to 20 percent emissions reduction by 2020 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050, among other targets.

Waxman and Markey hope to vote the bill out of committee by June. Because it will still face debate in the Energy and Commerce Committee and eventually in conference with the Senate leadership, however, it is certain to undergo major changes — and no one really expects it to emerge in anything resembling its current, highly ambitious form.

Update: And right on cue, the bill appears on the Energy and Commerce website. Here are the full text of the draft bill (648 pages) and the much more digestible summary.

President-elect Barack Obama will need to work effectively with Congress if he hopes to enact his legislative agenda. (WDCpix)

As President-elect Barack Obama assembles his administration, the final scenes of the 2008 campaign shift to Capitol Hill, where a lame-duck session shadowboxes over economic recovery measures. At the same time, the unresolved races in Georgia and Minnesota, the fate of renegade Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and the Democrats’ quest to construct a “filibuster-proof majority” highlight the crucial challenge for the incoming president: his ability to push legislation through both houses of Congress and appointments through the Senate.

Even with Obama’s party in power on Capitol Hill, that task will not prove simple. Nobody should expect a reprise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days, when Congress rushed to enact banking reforms without even getting the chance to read the legislation.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Indeed, an electoral mandate and majorities in both houses offer no guarantee of legislative success. President Jimmy Carter could not navigate his energy plan through a Democratic Congress (remember the cardigan?), nor could President Bill Clinton win support for his health-care plan (remember the Health Security Card?).

Republicans have fared no better. Fresh off his re-election victory in 2004, George W. Bush told the White House press corps that he had “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.“ He staked much of it on a proposal to privatize Social Security that failed to move through the GOP-controlled Congress.

How, then, might Obama avoid such pitfalls? The career of another senator-turned-president suggests some valuable lessons. During the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson transformed the relationship between the legislative and executive branches. A former Senate leader, LBJ immersed himself and his staff in all the details of legislation from “the cradle to the grave, from the moment a bill is introduced to the moment it is officially enrolled as the law of the land.”

Johnson visited the Capitol frequently and met constantly with congressional leaders. “There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress,” he said, “and that is continuously, incessantly and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves.”

Johnson ordered his staff to give congressional relations the highest priority. “You are going to get a lot of phone calls,” LBJ warned his White House advisers. “People are going to court you and flatter you because you have access to the president. You are going to find yourself a social lion and a fellow with more charm than you ever thought you had. And you will be all this because of the job you hold.” But, LBJ commanded, “the most important people you will talk to are senators and congressmen. You treat them as if they were president. Answer their calls immediately.”

Lyndon Johnson's relationship with Congress allowed him to pass the Civil Rights Bill in 1968. (Wikimedia Commons)

When Congress was in session, Johnson breakfasted every week with the legislative leadership. As they feasted on eggs, toasted homemade bread and links of the special deer sausage Johnson flew in from Texas, the president worked through a large posterboard sitting on an easel. The poster mapped out all the pending legislation in the House and Senate, plotting its path through the various committees down into a bowl drawn on the bottom of the chart to represent final passage of the law.

As they ate, LBJ applied the “Treatment,” cajoling, flattering and persuading the congressional leaders to move his bills forward. The chart accompanied Johnson to Cabinet meetings and his conferences with influential citizens. During 1965, it seemed to follow him everywhere.

Managing Congress also meant knowing when not to ask for a vote; understanding that allies — particularly in a broad, unstable majority — sometimes could not vote with the president. This is something Obama also needs to know. With more than 50 “Blue Dog Democrats” in the House, including conservative Southern and Western congressmen from districts carried strongly by Sen. John McCain, Obama will have to know when he can count on their votes, and when he must expect (and even approve) their opposition to preserve the long-term health of his majority.

For example, Johnson, who was determined to pass the civil-rights law that had stalled in Congress for decades, knew it was fruitless to apply pressure to Southern senators in his own party. “I can’t make a Southerner change his spots,” he told one civil-rights leader, “any more than I can make a leopard change them.” To shut off the inevitable filibuster, Johnson needed Republican votes — especially the support of the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

Johnson began a campaign of flattery — praising Dirksen’s statesmanship, asking his “advice” on appointments, granting him small victories against the White House. “You know this bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” Johnson told his floor manager for civil rights, Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.). “You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.” In the end, they got Dirksen and more than enough Republican votes to end the filibuster and pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

With the Blue Dogs in the House and fewer than 60 votes in the Senate, Obama will need to build and rebuild a shifting series of coalitions. Even if the Democrats do reach 60 votes in the Senate, that majority will only be “filibuster-proof” if the leadership can deliver every single vote for cloture. On few issues is a caucus that includes Lieberman and Edward M. Kennedy, Virginia’s Jim Webb, North Dakota’s Tim Johnson, and California’s Barbara Boxer likely to find unanimity.

Those ad hoc majorities were central to LBJ’s dealings with Congress. On civil rights, he needed northern Republicans. On Medicare and Food Stamps, he brought together conservative Southerners in his own party with liberal Northerners to overcome Republican opposition.

Sometimes, Johnson made concessions to influential congressmen, like Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Arkansas), chairman of the Ways-and-Means Committee. Other times he built broad coalitions by strategically larding bills with goodies for key legislators. A number of conservative Southern senators supported the food stamp program, for example, because Johnson made sure it was as generous to farmers as to the poor and hungry.

While Johnson’s White House almost never explicitly traded favors for particular votes, every member of Congress understood that cooperation brought benefits: invitations on foreign trips, influence on appointments, projects for the home district. When they voted against the president, recalcitrant members knew they would pay a price.

Defending a key vote against the administration, Sen. Frank Church told the president that celebrated newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann had endorsed his views. “I’ll tell you what, Frank,” the president replied, “next time you want a dam in Idaho, you call Walter Lippmann and let him put it through for you.”

So President Obama must know when to ease off, but he must also recognize when to push.

Johnson began the 89th Congress, the 1965 legislative session, with a commanding Democratic majority — 295 out of 435 votes in the House. For the first time in decades, the wide margin ensured a sympathetic majority for liberal measures.

Despite his popularity, John F. Kennedy had trouble getting his agenda passed. (Wikimedia Commons)

Even without the support of conservative Southern Democrats, the administration could count on enough votes to enact its reform agenda. As one of Johnson’s congressional liaisons put it, “When we have a fat Congress as we did in the 89th, then we can hike up our demands to fit the situation. When the votes are not razor thin,” he explained, then the administration had not pushed far enough.

The last time a sitting senator moved straight into the White House, familiarity with Congress bred only contempt. John F. Kennedy championed a slew of new programs, but with only a few exceptions the president could not get them enacted. The principal objectives of Kennedy’s domestic agenda — federal aid to education, a tax cut, and civil rights legislation — stalled on Capitol Hill.

The New York Times political reporter, Tom Wicker, described Kennedy’s inability to manage the Congress as one of the “great ironies of American politics. He wondered why “JFK, the immensely popular president, could not reach his legislative goals.” The stubborn opposition surprised Kennedy himself. “When I was a congressman,” the thwarted president mused, “I never realized how important Congress was. Now I do.”

Americans might hope that Obama learns that lesson sooner and better than his role model.

Bruce J. Schulman is the Huntington professor of American history at Boston University. His latest book, co-edited with Julian E. Zelizer, is “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s.” He is the author of “The ’70s: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics,” “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism” and “From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt : Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980.”