I didn't bother to read anything but the headline, because I'm tired of the endless crap that spews out of the Republican party. It's a never ending flow of sewage, and it stinks in every way.
They might as well be voting on whether the world is flat or not. This falls into the category of "not even wrong".
We already know how this is going to come out; the Republican House and Senate will scream "Hoax".
They will do this for a combination of ugly and stupid reasons. First, they are the party of greed. As long as the top 1% are raking it in they don't care who gets screwed. Second, they hate Obama personally, because he is an Uppity N*****. This is a way of telling him to go screw himself.
Finally, it's an expression of the one value that all Republicans agree on: Fuck You. This is the real motto of the Republican party. Being for something is not what motivates them, but being violently against something is what gets them off. They even love to do it to one another, which is why they sling the term RHINO around: Republican In Name Only. For them, it's a curse word.
If there is a scintilla of good to come from this, it's from the stain it will leave on the Republican party. When climate change effects start to really kick in over the next 20 years, they will be on record as being horribly wrong. Since climate change is going to be the defining issue of the 21st century, it will be hard to escape the shadow of this very high profile blunder.
Personally, I hope that not only the Republican party will be held accountable, but that the individuals who vote for this will suffer. When things get ugly, I want them to hounded and blamed in public, and have their lives ruined. It's all that they deserve, and it might serve as a lesson for the future that willful ignorance can have personal, as well as global, consequences.