It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that Governor Chris Christie is trying to weasel out of a program that would reduce New Jersey's carbon emissions, calling it a "completely useless plan." The New York Times says that this is because Christie is running for president in 2016, and that signing his name to a cap-and-trade program would offend Republican primary voters, and sure, that's certainly a concern. But I don't think it's his primary concern.

Christie loves to sell himself as a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy—remember his unapologetic praise of President Obama just before the 2012 elections—and I could see him embracing a kind of Schwarzeneggerian conservative environmentalism, if that suited him. He'd certainly welcome the opportunity to yell at a few crazy old climate-change-denying Teabaggers at town halls in Iowa next year, because that would get him the kind of glowing press that he loves. ("What a maverick," someone from Time would coo about Christie dressing down a hostile nonagenarian, "the governor sure does like to think outside the Republican box! But what does this mean for his chances in the caucuses?") So what's Christie doing here by coming out against a basic environmental plan? What's his motivation?

It's money, obviously. It's always money. Running for president is expensive work, and Christie has constructed an entire career (and wasted a considerable portion of New Jersey public employee retirement funds) around wooing Wall Street money-men to support his cause. And big business hates regulations, because regulations might scrape a couple pennies off the profit margin. This isn't Christie fearing reprisal from voters, and it's certainly not Christie expressing the courage of his convictions. As near as I can tell, it's a smarmy long con, played out in public.

We're seeing more and more examples of these kinds of transactional politics in the wide open. You know what we're not seeing? The fact that a proposed constitutional amendment to work around the Supreme Court's destruction of campaign finance reform laws was shot down in the Senate this week. The amendment would have limited money's influence in the political sphere, which is the single biggest problem in America today—the problem from which all other problems spring. (The votes fell, predictably, along party lines, which is yet another reason why you and everyone you know needs to vote in the upcoming midterm elections.) If you want to read about the collapse of the amendment, your best sources for news are a press release from independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and an article in the Reno News Review. The amendment wasn't a perfect solution—the ACLU was against it—but it was the best chance at starting a national conversation about the intensely romantic relationship between business and politicians. And now it's dead, and Chris Christie can keep sending love letters to Wall Street in public while everyone else frets and clutches their pearls about what this means for his presidential chances. It's not the politics we deserve, but it's the politics we've got.