Representative Henry Waxman of California was voted Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee today. Waxman ousted longtime committee Chairman John Dingell of Michigan by a vote of 137-122 in a secret ballot amongst House Democrats. Dingell had been the Chair or Ranking Member of the Energy & Commerce panel for the past 28 years. The Waxman-Dingell battle for the committee was one of the more hotly contested intra-party battles in DC in recent memory and clearly signals a new direction in the House regarding Energy Policy.

Waxman holding the gavel on energy matters in the House is what we call good news around here. Michigan Democrat Rep. Dingell was one of the staunchest advocates of the policy wishes of the Big Three Detroit automakers that the Capitol Dome had ever seen and it’s kind of hard to drastically change the energy policy, the way President-elect Obama and the Democratic leadership have proposed, when a key committee chair from your own party undermines you.

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Rep. Henry Waxman (left) and Rep. John Dingell (right)

The battle for Chair of the House Energy Committee is getting heated between Democrats John Dingell of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California.  Dingell, the current Chair of the committee, referred to his challenger Waxman recently in a Detroit radio interview as “anti-manufacturing left-wing Democrat” with a “serious lack of understanding of people in the auto industry and manufacturing generally.”  Waxman is not phased however, claiming to have the votes within the Democratic caucus to take the gavel of the powerful committee away from his Michigan colleague in the incoming Congress.

Why do we care you ask?  The reasons are pretty straighforward:

1. Committee Chairmanships are the true power centers in our Federal legislative process.  The Chair of a Committee chooses what legislation he or she will allow to come before the committee, thereby framing the entire discussion of what the fully assembled House of Representatives or Senate will eventually vote on.  If the Chair wants to push a new law through, they can.  If they wish to bury it, it will disappear, lost in the swamp of parliamentary procedures that litters the land around the U.S. Capitol.

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The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA to friends, relatives, and close neighbors, is being taken to task for caving in to pressure from the White House when it denied California’s effort to set the strictest auto emission standards in the nation.   Of course, I may have had some problems with the EPA in the past, but this time, we have, you know, testimony and subpoenaed documents and all sorts of fun things.   From the San Francisco Chronicle:

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, said the new details - revealed in sworn testimony from top EPA officials - showed that the White House “played a decisive role in the rejection of the California motor vehicle standards” in December.

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