This week, a resolution authored by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was voted down in the Senate. The resolution was a “Resolution of Disapproval” seeking to stop the EPA from implementing regulation of CO2 without direction or oversight from our elected officials. It is my opinion that the defeat of this resolution will have a profound impact on all of us.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) commented during his weekly YouTube address on the economic downside (to Iowa) of having “a faceless bureaucracy” stretching existing law, like the Clean Air Act to regulate in new areas. Perhaps Senator Grassley’s reference to the EPA as a faceless bureaucracy was made in the interest of brevity; perhaps it was meant to underscore the lack of accountability that federal agencies have to our elected officials – much less, We the People. I would assert, however, that the EPA has a face. That face is Lisa Perez Jackson, the Administrator of the EPA and willing proxy for the face of President Barack Obama, who appointed her.
While candidate Obama did make many environmental promises during his campaign, perhaps most who voted for Him expected some tempering of those promised transformations by the Legislature and by the law of the land. I think most did not expect a willingness to crash the entire economy on the belief that imposing strict economic constraints on fossil fuels would (or could) magically produce a new society powered by “clean energy”. Most did not recognize the impotence of the current Legislature, or the unwillingness of the current Judiciary, to check any action of the Executive.
Parenthetically, I am not saying a move toward clean energy is bad. Far from it. As a Christian, I take seriously our charge by God Almighty to be good stewards of the planet. I am saying that applying punitive measures to the energy we have access to now is the wrong way to effect meaningful change. We need that energy to have any hope of the development from which improvements can flow. I am not saying the EPA has no valid function, either. They have a place enforcing the law for those who don’t pay any attention to God Almighty. They don’t have a valid right to reinterpret or stretch the law to new ends.
The new President picked his EPA Administrator carefully. At least, his transition team did. She has a public record that makes it easy to predict a kindred ideology. One can easily see that the tactic of using various federal agencies to institute radical policy is not an afterthought. This framework was being laid from the outset of this administration against the contingency that it might be difficult to accomplish radical change through the Legislature. Of course, while the global climate change agenda is controversial and many of us consider the science suspect. Ms. Jackson expresses no doubts. On Monday, December 6th,,2009 Lisa Jackson, as administrator of EPA, issued a statement declaring “greenhouse gases a threat to human health”. Fox News reported on the statement at the time. No one outside the administration, though, seemed to realize exactly where this was going.
Let me cite this rather amazing C-Span video as proof that Ms. Jackson is fully on board with the goals of this administration. I tried to go back in Senate records for any debate on Ms. Jackson’s confirmation by the Senate back on January22, 2008. But, it looks like a rubber stamp to me. This may not be particularly surprising, as Lisa Jackson has a long resume of environmental work for both the EPA and the State of New Jersey. She has been pragmatic enough in the past to get her on the wrong side of the most extreme environmentalists, but radical enough to garner criticism from the other side too. In January of 2008, few were adequately suspicious of the new administration’s agenda.
Murkowski’s “Resolution of Disapproval” captured 100% of the votes of Republican Senators and six Democrats. That was not enough to pass. Not enough to reign in an Environmental Protection Agency bent on Obama’s radical agenda at any cost. If We the People don’t do some serious rearranging in both the House and the Senate in November, These unconstitutional maneuvers by radicalized federal agencies will continue to escalate. As it is, there is little practical difference between the operation of the current administration and an absolute monarchy. Can’t we vote to get back to a constitutional republic? Can’t we return the EPA to its rightful place of enforcing established law?
