The Waxman-Markey bill (a.k.a. the energy reform bill, a.k.a. the climate change bill) is expected to come up for a House vote today. Passage requires 218 votes, and it’s not at all clear the votes exist:

According to an E&E analysis of the floor debate, Democrats still have their work cut out for them. Even with an agreement reached this week with Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), sponsors still remain about 35 votes short of the 218 needed to pass the climate legislation.

Fence-sitters include dozens of Republicans and a number of Midwestern and Southern Democrats, as well as many lawmakers who were first elected to the House in 2006 and 2008.

“It’s tough sometimes to get to a hard ‘yes’ on an issue like this,” explained Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), a senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. “I don’t know that we’ll get to the point where you say we have 218 hard yeses. But I think we’re so close now, and there’s so many undecideds leaning ‘yes,’ that there’s a sense once you put it on the floor, they’re going to vote with us.”

Pelosi is working very hard:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s schedule yesterday underscored just how much she is working to try and pass the bill. Pelosi had individual meetings with Democratic freshmen and sophomores, as well as five members of the Ohio Democratic delegation, and seven Republicans who are considered potential supporters (Mike Castle of Delaware, Vernon Ehlers of Michigan, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Leonard Lance and Frank LoBiondo of New Jersey, Thomas Petri of Wisconsin and Dave Reichert of Washington).

During one floor vote, Pelosi was also in plain view of several reporters personally lobbying Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) on the climate bill.

Liberals, though, regard the bill as severely less-than-perfect. It’s possible to view the bill as a useful first step in fighting climate change. It’s certainly plausible to argue that a bill more to liberals’ liking would probably never fly. But a Washington Post editorial still comes out against the bill today:

If all goes according to plan, the House will vote today on Waxman-Markey, a mammoth bill that would tackle climate change. After eight years of inaction on global warming, the will to legislate should be celebrated. So should the stated goal: limiting pollution by capping greenhouse gas emissions and putting a price on carbon. But that’s about as far as our enthusiasm goes.
[...]
Waxman-Markey would mandate a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels. This is weaker than what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls for but a lot better than nothing. The government would set a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide that could be emitted and would issue allowances to polluting sectors that could buy and sell those rights.

This complex system has some theoretical advantages over our preferred alternative — a straightforward, easily understood carbon tax — but it could be vulnerable to manipulation that would compromise its effect. Already pollution credits and their revenue are being divvied up to the advantage of polluters. During the campaign, President Obama supported the cleanest variation of this mechanism: selling all emission allowances at auction. This week he abandoned that sensible stance with a full-throated endorsement of Waxman-Markey, which gives away 85 percent of the pollution credits in the first years of the program and provides many avenues potentially to evade compliance. While in theory the bill relies on the market to find the most efficient alternatives to greenhouse-gas emitting energy sources, in practice its subsidies, regulations and exemptions could skew the outcome in costly ways.

Even if it passes today, Waxman-Markey is just a first step. With a flood of amendments to the House bill expected today and fierce battles to come in the Senate, the debate over how to design this fundamental shift in the American economy remains wide open. It’s not too late to hope for a cleaner cap-and-trade bill — such proposals are circulating on Capitol Hill — or a properly designed carbon tax that would send the right market signal to spur green-energy innovation while also leading to vital changes in behavior.

We’re not ignorant of political realities, and we don’t believe the perfect should become the enemy of the good. Congress should deliver a bill to Mr. Obama this year. But given that congressional action could set a template for years or decades, we think it’s too soon to settle for something that falls so far short of ideal.

And even if it gets passed by the House, the Waxman-Markey bill may not stand any kind of chance in the Senate. Recent history has been that bills which pass by overwhelming margins in the house (and enjoy popular support by a wide margin) get filibuster-strangled to death in the Senate. And one of the Republican Party’s most doggedly determined climate-change deniers, Senator James Inhofe, showed up in the House Wednesday night to guarantee that the bill will never pass in the Senate:

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) made a surprise appearance on the House floor last night, speaking to about seven Democratic and Republican lawmakers about the prospects of action on the climate issue in the Senate.

“I was allaying the concerns of a lot of them who didn’t know what was going to happen in the Senate on cap and trade and what I felt,” Inhofe said afterward. “Or, it’s better said what was not going to happen in the Senate. There’s no way they can get the votes to pass it.”

Sounds like the Washington Post and Imhofe may actually be on the same side on this one (albeit for very different reasons!).