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With Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell promising an open debate on the Keystone XL pipeline bill, Senator Bernie Sanders, the maverick Independent from Vermont, has crafted a beauty of an amendment. He plans to offer a “sense of Congress” resolution in the debate asking each senator if he or she agrees with “the opinion of virtually the entire worldwide scientific community” that climate change is a factually proven problem resulting in “devastating problems in the United States and around the world.”

If nothing else, the proposal should attract extra attention to the pipeline debate and Republican members’ discomfort in staking an un-hedged position on the global warming issue.



Senator McConnell, anxious to garner all the support he can, insisted there will be no back room maneuvering to block amendments. “We are wide open,” he told Capitol reporters. When asked if that included the Sanders amendment, Mr. McConnell exclaimed, “Yeah,” according to The Hill newspaper.

The Sanders amendment confronts what lately has been the classic answer from Republican politicians trying the shave the issue: “I’m no scientist.”

“Okay, but what do you think as a senator?” is effectively Mr. Sanders’ follow-up question. No I’m-glad-you-asked-me-that essay answers, please. An aye or a nay will do, on the record.

Registered Republican voters recently faced much the same question (“Do you think global warming is happening?”) from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Forty-four percent agreed it was. That’s not a majority, but at least they answered unequivocally—which is exactly what Senator Sanders is aiming to make his colleagues do next week.