Intellectual Property Law

The general public may not be thrilled with the $700 billion "financial rescue" package that the House approved and President Bush signed Friday, but the alternative energy industry cheered its passage because the legislation includes renewals of tax breaks that company executives had worried would expire at the end of the year.

Included in the legislation Friday was a one-year extension of a tax break for wind energy production companies, and an eight year extension of a 30 percent tax break for residential and commercial solar installations.

"The bill is a major step in our long journey toward energy independence and ensures that solar energy will be a significant part of America's energy future," said the Solar Energy Industries Association president Rhone Resch in a statement. "This long-term extension of solar tax credits will create a domestic solar industry with hundreds of thousands of jobs while providing clean, affordable, carbon-free energy to millions of American families, businesses and communities."   

The renewable energy industry had been fretting all year that members of Congress would adjourn without renewing the tax breaks, which company representatives said would have put a crimp in the industry's growth because they would have had a harder time obtaining financing.

The bailout legislation included several other items that gave obscure tax breaks to the makers of wooden arrows, the film industry in Puerto Rico and a tariff suspension on wool imports, among other things.

Various accounts of the passage of the legislation over the past couple of days suggest that the inclusion of these earmarks didn't really have much of an impact on changing House members' votes.

For example, OpenCongress, a citizen-powered project that uses the web to track federal legislation, cobbled together a list of House members who had supported some of the amendments.

There doesn't appear to be a clear linkage between the sponsors of those amendments, and their voting patterns (here's the final roll call vote.) Many of the sponsors of the amendments ended up voting "no" to the bailout legislation on Friday.

Meanwhile, a report from National Journal's CongressDaily says that Democrats who voted for the bill were persuaded by phone calls from Barack Obama, and several Republicans who changed their votes were persuaded by calls from members of the US Chamber of Commerce.