What Tomorrow’s Elections Mean for Science and Technology [Midterm Elections]

Tuesday’s midterms could mean more than just a routine reshuffling of the House and Senate majorities. The fates of several important science and technology policies also hang inside the balance.

Net Neutrality
If things go the best way the polls seem to suggest , the fight to keep an open Internet could become much harder next year. Incumbent congressman and front-runner to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), has already said there might be little incentive to support the current temporary compromise if Republicans capture the House on Tuesday. That’s no surprise since Upton himself has long history of Net neutrality opposition.

” Knowing we’ll have a miles stronger hand come January, there’s no reason behind us to compromise or save someone’s bacon,” Upton said in an interview with Politico .

Over the past five months, telecom and Internet companies had been scrambling to return up with a compromise for the controversial issue. The current draft would have granted the FCC temporary authority to manage content on the web, but not on wireless networks. But even that neutered version never came practically the House floor, as key Republicans refused to sign up to the draft legislation. Don’t expect things to get well if Tea Party candidates also win seats, either. A coalition that included 35 groups sent a letter to the FCC last August urging it not to extend authority over broadband providers because doing so can be ” an affront to free speech .”

NASA Budget
Surprise! NASA’s having money problems. Republican gains inside the midterm elections will likely make matters worse for the agency. After a review called it underfunded and overambitious, Obama opted to end to the Constellation program last February . As a substitute, the administration said it wanted to reallocate that cash for brand new technologies and private spaceflight. The difficulty? Congress balked. In late September, it passed another act actually requesting funds for projects initiated under Constellation, but in addition granting lower than half of the administration’s request for private spaceflight. Now, with Congress in recess and still unable to get a revised budget, NASA is locked into its current funding level. In essence, which means the agency has to keep spending on programs that it’s going to must kill anyway, and may’t start new ones. It’s thought that if Democrats retain control of the Senate and House, they’ll probably pass an appropriations bill to allocate additional money for NASA. And if the Republicans prevail? Well, negotiations is generally deferred until January, when the party would take over the appropriations subcommittee.

Environmental Policy
In his inauguration speech, Obama promised to ” restore science to its rightful place.” Keeping that promise won’t be easy over the following two years if Tea Party candidates win key races ( Delaware , Colorado, and Nevada are the large ones) this Tuesday. If the GOP grabs a majority within the Senate, global warming naysayer Rep. James Inhofe of Oklahoma is poised to over again become majority leader of our surroundings and Public Works Committee. That committee oversees things like pollution and wildlife regulations, in addition as public works projects. Inhofe, you possibly can remember, famously called global warming the ” greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the yank people” during his previous tenure as the committee’s Majority Leader from 2003-2007. Other threats to environmental policy include Tea Party darling Sharron Angle (R), who also believes global warming is a number of hooey. On the contrary, she wants to scrap the Environmental Protection Agency altogether. Angle is currently in a fierce battle with Senate majority leader Harry Reid in Nevada.

Taxes
It’s been an epic year for corporate profits. In line with the Commerce Department, profits have surged 62 percent from the start of 2009 to mid-2010. That’s faster than any other year and a half period since the 20s. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped major Silicon Valley companies from pressuring lawmakers to ease up on the current tax code. With an estimated 1.2 trillion in profits still parked in overseas bank accounts, US tech companies claim that it’s become way too expensive to bring that cash back to the U.S. under the current tax law. While it’s unclear whether any substantive changes will probably be enacted inside the next two years, you might count a Republican majority sympathizing with that plight way more than a Democrat-run House and Senate.

Prop 23
It doesn’t get as much play as other ballot measures (cough, Prop 19… whoa…). Still, Prop 23 has huge implications for California . Bankrolled by two Texan oil companies (and supported by Tea Party), this proposition would essentially suspend the state’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act until California’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5 per cent or less throughout one year. (Note: Those conditions were met only thrice since 1980.) In essence, it’s a cynical try to pit jobs vs. the planet, and hopefully one voters will see through. If it passes, parts of the Act, including a mandate to come back California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and a cap-and-trade system which may be introduced in 2012, will undoubtedly be delayed. Thankfully, neither of the state gubernatorial candidates-Meg Whitman (R) or Jerry Brown (D)-supports the proposition. Whitman does, however, endorse suspending the GWSA for no less than a year while the economy recovers.

Stem Cell Legislation
Last March, when Republican Congressman Mike Castle introduced a bill supporting human embryonic stem-cell research to america House of Representatives, the goal was with the intention that an over-arching ethical framework was signed into law by Congress. Unfortunately, Castle, who gave up his House seat to run for the Senate, lost his party’s nomination to Tea Party-backed opponent Christine O’Donnell . O’Donnell happens to be resolutely against stem cell science and, well, all science traditionally. Back in 1998, she described evolution as a ” myth,” and when challenged about that assertion, her comeback was: ” Well then, why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” Awesome. Scientists also must worry about a current lawsuit that seeks to suspend federal funding for the stem cell research that can overturn guidelines implementing Obama’s order as early as next month. That possibility has advocates calling for Congress to pass the Castle bill, co-sponsored by Diana DeGette (Democrat, Colorado), during its post-election session, before the most recent congress is seated.

Source

This post is tagged: broadband providers, commerce committee, controversial issue, incumbent congressman, internet companies, midterm elections, technology policies