Stop the Unconstitutional, Jobs-Killing, EPA Regul

[scpg02]

Stop the Unconstitutional, Jobs-Killing, EPA Regulation of Carbon Dioxide

Written by Larry Greenley
Friday, 29 January 2010 11:43

Just in time to bolster President Obama's "green" credentials at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced on December 7, 2009: "Today I'm proud to announce that EPA has finalized its endangerment finding on greenhouse gas pollution and is now authorized and obligated to make reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse pollutants under the Clean Air Act" (view video).

So, even though the cap and trade energy tax bill was stalled in the U.S. Senate, President Obama was able to point to the EPA announcement in Copenhagen to show the commitment of the U.S. government to take measures to reduce greenhouse gases as part of the whole global warming/climate change charade being participated in by our political, news media, and academic elites.

The whole idea of the EPA, an executive branch agency which was created by President Richard Nixon through an executive order in 1970, creating environmental regulations with the force of law is at odds with the U.S. Constitution. The first sentence of Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution states very simply: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." This means all law-making power resides in Congress. So, if the federal government undertakes to regulate greenhouse gases, Congress must be passing the regulatory laws, not the EPA. However, even Congress is not authorized by the Constitution to regulate the production of greenhouse gases.



Fortunately, there is a movement in Congress to prohibit the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. There are two bills in the House and one proposed amendment in the Senate to do just this.

The first bill in the House is H.R. 391 which was introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on January 9, 2009 and which currently has 151 cosponsors. The purpose of this bill is to: (1) stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases by amending the Clean Air Act to exclude greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide; and (2) by expliciting stating, "Nothing in the Clean Air Act shall be treated as authorizing or requiring the regulation of climate change or global warming."

The second bill in the House is H.R. 4396 which was introduced by Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) on December 16, 2009. This bill would prohibit EPA regulation of greenhouse gases by amending the Clean Air Act to provide that greenhouse gases are not subject to the Act.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) has taken a different approach in the Senate. She has introduced a resolution, which is supported by 35 Republicans and three Democrats so far, that could be used as an amendment and attached to the bill of her choice or introduced as a standalone bill. The purpose of this resolution is "To prohibit the use of funds [by the EPA for one year] to regulate or control carbon dioxide from any sources other than a mobile source or to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant subject to certain regulations." Senator Murkowski's approach is much narrower than the two House bills in that it only prohibits EPA regulation of carbon dioxide for one year, and then only for non-mobile sources.

Although Senator Murkowski's resolution is a step in the right direction and deserves support, the approach of H.R. 391 is much better and should be supported for passage in both House and Senate.

Contact your representative and senators and tell them to "stop the unconstitutional, jobs-killing, EPA regulation of carbon dioxide."

[curiousgeorge]

What we are witnessing with this, is one of many battles currently being fought between the Executive Branch, and the other 2 "Separate, but Equal" branches of Govt. Even Obama himself fired a shot at the other 2 branches during his State of the Union address the other day. I think it's glaringly apparent that Obama would very much like to be the ONLY branch. I hope he can be stopped before it's too late.

[sentient]

Obama versus Obama
Will the real Barack Obama please stand up?
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

There is little need any more to offer consistent opposition to Barack Obama, since he himself is already running hard against the many previous incarnations of Barack Obama.

The first one we met was Barack the radical progressive, in his primary campaign against Hillary. Then in the general election we were introduced to the centrist Obama, who promised to invade Pakistan if need be, called for an end to partisanship, and lectured about fiscal sobriety.

Then with congressional majorities, soaring public support, and obsequious media attention came the leftist ideologue President Obama, who tried to ram through a statist healthcare regime, gobbled up private enterprises, and gave us Anita Dunn and Van Jones.

Now we are back to sorta centrist Obama, who is going to fight terror, not apologize any more to the Muslim world, and freeze spending rather than give us another $2 trillion in debt.

These serial reset Obamas are quite astonishing even for a politician.

Take the examples of public advocate Obama’s once idealistic promotion of C-SPAN broadcasts of the healthcare debate, and Obama’s current fiery lamentations over the Supreme Court decision overturning elements of the McCain-Feingold limitations on corporate campaign donations.

But Obama, the current reformer, seems to be railing at Obama, the cynical backroom organizer, who would never dare televise anything about his thousand-page healthcare mess. Yet Obama II not only nixed Obama I’s repeated promises of C-SPAN debates, but outsourced his healthcare bill to congressional insiders, who did more backroom-dealing, vote-buying, and quid-pro-quoing than at any other time in recent memory.


So there is no consistency even in the flip-flopping. Obama III as the sudden guardian of campaign-financing curbs is antithetical to Obama I, the rejectionist of any government interference. In 2008 Obama I destroyed the idea of public campaign financing of presidential elections. Indeed, in his efforts to raise a billion dollars of private money, Obama became the first presidential candidate in the general election in over 30 years to back out of public financing, an idea which is now more or less kaput.

So what is the present-day Obama III? Nothing and everything. We have no idea whether he is against corporate campaign contributions, given Obama I/II’s voracious appetite for them. Will he accept public campaign financing in the future? Only if his money machine stalls? Is C-SPAN necessary for or irrelevant to public debate?

Take also terrorism. Obama 1.0, the champion of civil liberties, based the entire foreign-policy side of his 2007–08 campaign on the notion of George W. Bush’s shredding the Constitution in his unnecessary War on Terror and his venture into Iraq. Obama at one time or another attacked almost every Bush protocol — e.g., renditions (“shipping away prisoners in the dead of night”), military tribunals (“flawed military commission system”), preventive detention (“detaining thousands without charge or trial”), the surge of troops into Iraq (“not working”), the Patriot Act (“shoddy and dangerous”). We were to have all combat troops out of Iraq by August 2010, and Guantanamo (“a legal black hole,” “a sad chapter in American history,” “a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus”) closed last week. Predator strikes, according to candidate Obama, recklessly terrorized civilians.

But Obama 2.0 seemed to be ignoring Obama 1.0. Our realist president embraced renditions and tribunals, still held terrorists in preventive detention, kept troops in Iraq, championed the Patriot Act, and apparently counted on Guantanamo to stay open. Three days after he took office Obama ordered our first reported Hellfire missile attacks inside Pakistan itself.

And Obama 3.0? His team renamed the War on Terror “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” dithered on troop escalations in Afghanistan, allowed his attorney general to go after CIA interrogators, gave the Christmas Day al-Qaeda would-be mass murderer his Miranda rights, and plans to try in a civilian court the architect of 9/11 a few blocks from where his evil genius led to the incineration of 3,000 Americans. But wait — Obama 3.0 has also belatedly expanded the war in Afghanistan, has vastly increased the controversial judge/jury/executioner Predator attacks, and is talking more about terror and less about the mythical achievements of the Muslim world. That’s quite an abyss to bridge — insisting that a known mass murderer like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets his Miranda rights while blasting to smithereens suspected terrorists and their families in their living rooms in Pakistan.

Obama versus Obama versus Obama could be played out in almost any venue. In 2008 he was the candidate who, in response to the McCain-Palin “Drill, baby, drill” mantra during the energy-price spike, supported more drilling, expansion of nuclear power, and using all our energy resources. Then, in the euphoria of early 2009, it was to be cap-and-trade and the solar/wind vision of Van Jones. Now there is a nothing-and-everything energy policy, apparently depending on the polls and the price of energy at any given moment.

Candidate Obama warned that the “Bush deficits” would cripple his imaginative spending agenda. Yet President Obama damned the red-ink torpedoes and went full speed ahead into far greater deficits, resulting in an addition to the national debt of nearly $2 trillion in his first year alone. Yet reset-button Obama is already calling for a national commission to freeze (some) spending and “address” the spiraling deficit.

Two observations. First, there is a hazy pattern to the Obama tri-step: soar with progressive platitudes when there is no responsibility of governance; then as president slowly learn that a center-right country is not ready to blame itself for radical Islam or destroy the private-sector entrepreneurship that made America wealthy beyond imagination; and end up with an ad hoc, poll-driven policy of everything and nothing.

The problem with Obama 1-2-3 is that progressives rightly feel betrayed and now see their once-in-a-century savior exposed as an inept triangulator, without the Machiavellian savvy of Bill Clinton or the input of thingy Morris.

Conservatives, however, who should appreciate that Obama is still fighting in Afghanistan and has kept the Bush anti-terrorism protocols, are enraged about the KSM trial, the Abdulmutallab mess, and the demagoguing about the CIA and Guantanamo.

Second, this absence of consistency, of identity even, was entirely predictable — given what the nation knew of newcomer candidate Barack Obama in the brief two-year period we were introduced to him.

He sermonized on purple-state America after compiling the most partisan record in the Senate. He talked of political and racial reconciliation, while assembling the most radically divisive cast of intimates imaginable — Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, the Rev. James Meeks, Father Michael Pfleger, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He soared about a new transparency, but unlike rival McCain never fully released his medical records, his college transcripts, or the details of his Senate race.

If we do not know who Barack Obama is, that may be because Barack Obama does not know who Barack Obama is. Barry Dunham? Barry Soetoro? Barack Soetoro? Barry Obama? Barack Obama?

Is he the racial healer who called his own ailing grandmother a “typical white person”? The white middle-class prep-schooler, or the authentically African-American community organizer?

The hip, yuppie multicultural agnostic — or the devotee of the them/us wacky old-time religion of Trinity Church?

The working-class populist who ridiculed the culture of rural Pennsylvania?

The modern-day Cicero who needs a teleprompter?

The Harvard Law graduate and Chicago law professor who gets confused about everything from Cinco de Mayo to the number of states? The Chicago progressive who regularly voted present? The reformist Senate candidate whose rivals in both the primary and general elections mysteriously found their divorce records leaked?

By pleasing his immediate audience with his mellifluous rhetoric and clichés about his racial transcendence, Obama has always charmed his way up his cursus honorum. Why worry about the nonexistent record, broken promises, empty platitudes, and self-contradictions when his mesmerized audiences believed that he believed in them, and lapped up the inexpensive absolutions for their assorted past sins?

The only catch is that Barack Obama no longer navigates among gullible Ivy League deans, naïve philanthropists, and inept organizers and bureaucrats. No, he is running a country that still has millions of no-nonsense truckers, teachers, small-business owners, and general skeptics who don’t give a damn about either Harvard or Chicago. And in their eyes, after a year, the game is about up.

Yet in a weird sort of consistency, Obama remains what he always was. Whatever we choose to see in this glass mirror, he will sorta, kinda reflect our vision.

Obama is our first everything-and-nothing president.
Every Senate Democrat voted to raise debt limit to $14.3 trillion
By Michelle Malkin • January 28, 2010 01:02 PM
Every Senate Democrat voted to raise the debt limit to $14.3 trillion. The vote was 60-40 on straight partisan lines.
Let me repeat that — and let it be repeated loudly and often:
Every Senate Democrat voted to raise the debt limit to $14.3 trillion.
That’s $45,000 per American.
Here’s the roll call vote:

Can’t say it enough: There is no such thing as a “moderate Democrat” in the Senate.
Question: Why is Democrat MA Sen. Paul Kirk still voting?

Attacking SCOTUS
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 4:15 PM

While many have remarked upon the president's unprecedented attack on the Supreme Court in last night's speech --many presidents have attacked many courts and many decisions, just not in the context of a SOTU when the justices are obliged by custom to attend and by tradition never to comment on the substance of the speech-- very few have noted that the specific decision attacked, Citizens United, had its majority opinion authored by Justice Kennedy, the swing vote on the Court and the one, presumably, the president needs most in all of the cases that matter to him while the court's makeup remains the same. It was shocking for a former Con Law professor to step over the unseen but very real lines of decorum that protect and help preserve separation of powers and the mutual respect between the branches that strengthens the Republic, but it also simply amazing that the political instincts of the president are so off center these days that he traded the fleeting thrill of an applause line or two for whatever the cost of an insult delivered to the key vote on the court.

[sentient]

The roll call vote:

Attachments:

[sigurdur]

www.ocregister.com/opinion/global-231562-warming-climate.html