Reid says Senate won’t pass House climate change bill; immigration a priority; health care this month

Right before this week’s congressional recess, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a controversial bill to tackle climate change, putting the ball in the Senate’s court on that issue.

Sen. Harry Reid said Tuesday that the bill that passed the House could not get enough votes to pass the Senate. Instead, he said, the Senate would be crafting its own legislation on the issue, with a target of getting it to the floor in the fall.

“We’ll do our own bill, because we have some different issues than they have,” Reid said in an interview. “We have a block of states -- Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana -- that are very dependent on coal. For example, Indiana is 95 percent dependent on coal. So we have to take all that into consideration. The House didn’t have to do that.”

Reid was referring to industrial-state Democrats’ resistance to restrictions on carbon emissions.

The Senate’s bill, Reid said, should have a more provisions for new transmission lines and potentially a different structure for the cap-and-trade system that is the bill’s centerpiece.

Reid said his top priorities for the second half of a busy legislative year are health care, energy and immigration. He’s determined to bring up immigration soon, even though White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently said the votes aren’t there for it.

As for health care, Reid said a reform bill will go to the floor of the Senate “in the month of July.”

“We have to do something on health care. If we don’t, by the year 2020, 35 percent of all the money we spend in America will be for health care,” he said.

Congress is back in session Monday after spending this week off for Independence Day.