.
Cap-And-Traitors
Investor’s Business Daily
06/11/2010
The Senate just claimed the title of the world’s most delusional body by refusing to strip unelected EPA bureaucrats of the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. This was the day freedom died.
One wonders why we have a Congress at all. The 53 profiles in cowardice that could not get a cap-and-tax bill through the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to let the Environmental Protection Agency keep the unprecedented power Congress did not expressly give it. It is power that the EPA arrogated to itself through regulation to control every aspect of the American economy and our very lives.
This country was born over anger at taxation without representation. Regulation without representation may spark another revolt come November. The Tea Party movement began precisely because of such arrogant disregard for the wishes of the American people. Unlike health care reform, this time the cowardly lions of the Senate couldn’t even do it themselves and ceded their authority to the EPA.
It was only a motion to proceed to consideration of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution (S.J. Res. 26) which, under a forgotten provision of the Contract With America, lets legislators veto a “major rule” by any regulatory agency within 60 days of publication. It needed just 51 votes; it got 47.
All 41 Republicans, including newbie Scott Brown of Massachusetts, voted not to shred the Constitution. The motion attracted, for various reasons, the votes of six Democrats — Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, the departing Evan Bayh and even Jay Rockefeller, who for once chose jobs over ideology.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin accused the Republicans of choosing “political science over the real science,” even after the EPA’s junk science based on the manipulation of data by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been exposed as a manufactured fraud.
The case for climate change has collapsed — a fact recognized, finally, by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who, with Democrat John Kerry and independent Joseph Lieberman, once hoped to work out some kind of compromise legislation with a token nod to domestic energy production.
Last week, Graham told reporters he would vote against the climate bill he helped author. “The science about global warming has changed,” Graham told reporters Wednesday on why he was backing an energy bill by Sen. Dick Lugar. “I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question.”
Hardly a profile in courage, since the legislation wasn’t going anywhere, but welcome aboard nonetheless. The science behind cap-and-trade is not only in question, it’s nonexistent. The Earth is demonstrably cooling, and the trend will likely continue for decades, according to scientists who don’t tamper with the data.
So delusional are Senate Democrats that California’s Barbara Boxer, in trying to advance her own failed cap-and-tax bill, said on the Senate floor: “I’m going to put in the record … a host of quotes from our national security experts who tell us that carbon pollution leading to climate change will be over the next 20 years the leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm’s way.” So, forget that Iranian nuke.
This is a Congress full of hypocrites who complain about executive branch power under Republicans but are willing to give the EPA unprecedented power because they don’t have the votes for cap-and-trade. “Who elected the Environmental Protection Agency?” asked Wyoming Republican John Barrasso. It is a question we, and the voters, ask too.
.
Wild Thing’s comment……..
Every Senator who voted to abdicate the power of the Congress to a department of unelected unaccountable bureaucrats should be removed from office without further discussion!”
Take their pensions away too.
I honestly think most of the Senate Democrats are too stupid to realize the Obama administration is gradually making Congress totally impotent and eventually not needed.
“The 53 profiles in cowardice that could not get a cap-and-tax bill through the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to let the Environmental Protection Agency keep the unprecedented power Congress did not expressly give it. “
WHEW God help us!! Liberty is threatened as the U.S. Senate surrenders its power to the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. The EPA has now assigned itself the right to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, without legislative authorization. This the ultimate tyranny; regulation by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, without Congressional authorization. We cannot let this happen! Our precious rights are slipping away!
Toll free numbers to the Capitol Switchboard are:
877-762-8762, 866-338-1015, 866-220-0044, 877-851-6437, 877-210-5351.
Some of these numbers may have changed since I last used them but it can’t hurt to try.
EPA does not run the United States. They need to be shut down now.
regulate CO2 as a pollutant…
Take a step back and look. They are regulating our very breath. What is next, Oxygen? WTH??!!
My congressman, Ike Skelton (D), voted for cap & trade saying it would prevent the EPA from getting this type of power. He was concerned that the EPA was going to regulate cow flatulence (farts). He has now hurt himself by voting for cap & trade and the EPA has the power he feared.
We all knew this was coming.
This Congress is filled with Lame Ducks, and they know it.
Between now and next January,when the new Congress is sworn in, you can bet that there will be a number of other bills passed of this nature, all of which will be designed to further denigrate and weaken this Great Nation.
They are mortgaging our future and they don’t care! Let us hope and pray that it is not too late.
Obama to Tea Partiers: See! The Gulf Disaster is What Smaller Government Will Get You.
And when you have a huge, unwieldy, behmouth of a blundering, stupid bureaucracy they can’t fix the problem. We are now in day 56 of the oil spill/Leak…no gusher, a spill or a leak implies something small.
Obama’s idea of good government is where Bureaucrats are in charge of the weak minded but basically, good people. First they demean them, they find a victim and claim, now the government needs to step in and regulate these weak minded for their own good. Why when the government gets involved in regulation the problems never go away they either stay the same or get even worse.
Though sometimes, these weak people simply make mistakes, out of ignorance or carelessness and not out of greed, as obama would have you believe.
But politicians and bureaucrats are people too, and subject to these same failings. Do we really solve the problem of human imperfection by giving one small group of imperfect people vast power over all the other imperfect people?
Once the EPA grabs this power you now have another branch of government, a 4th branch. Whose Politicians and bureaucrats have a monopoly over the use of political force. They also have access to vastly greater resources than even the largest businesses. And they cannot be easily fired, unlike a business, if at all. And are not accountable to anyone.
Now we have a dilemma, 4 branches of government, one newly created by a pussified Congress because they are too yellow to do their job, and a country on the verge of collapse.
I don’t know what the solution is, I do know we are in grave danger of losing all our God given Liberties and Freedoms.
Well written Mark. We may soon have a dozen branches of govt. all headed by an unelected “czar”. Our freedoms are being exchanged for regulations. Capital and business will be stiffled and more jobs going overseas. Fewer jobs means more unemployed workers that need moma govt to take care of them and of course more govt agencies. It is a cancer.We know we have it. What will we do about it in the next 30 months?
Mark’s right. I believe we already have that 4th branch of government. Both the EPA and IRS, all bureaucrats, have their own rules and laws which they enact and enforce. When you run afoul of their rules, your tried in their courts with their judges sitting on their bench where you basically have no constitutional rights. Do you realize the IRS can do what it takes the President of the US to declare Martial Law to do; confiscate private property without a court order.
BobF., thanks for sharing about your Congressman.Amazing to think like he does.
Sean, >i>”They are mortgaging our future and they don’t care! ” they really are.
Mark, well said, really good, thank you.
Tom, your so right, “Our freedoms are being exchanged for regulations.”