Via Dave Roberts, here's the rousing tale of how John Boehner decided which House Republicans would get to serve on the new select committee on climate change:
House Republican Leader John Boehner would have appointed Rep. Wayne Gilchrest to the bipartisan Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming -- but only if the Maryland Republican would say humans are not causing climate change, Gilchrest said.
"I said, 'John, I can't do that,'" Gilchrest, R-1st-Md., said in an interview."He said, 'Come on. Do me a favor. I want to help you here.'
Gilchrest didn't make the committee. ... Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a research scientist from Maryland, and Michigan's Rep. Vern Ehlers, the first research physicist to serve in Congress, also made cases for a seat, but weren't appointed, he said.
Instead, James Sensenbrenner--one of the finest scientific minds of our age--got the nod, only narrowly edging out Dana Rohrabacher, whose theory that "dinosaur flatulence" may have caused global warming wasn't quite ready for prime-time, apparently.
--Bradford Plumer