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CAP AND TRADE UPDATE

Senate Rejects Move to Block EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases - Government Takes Control of One More Piece of Your Life 

 

June 10, 2010 

Sections taken from Associated Press

 

The Senate has voted today to give EPA the authority to turn out the lights on America by voting no.  All 41 Republicans and 6 Democrats voted yes to pass the SJ Resolution 26, but 53 Democrats voted no.

 

The Senate has rejected a bid (SJ Resolution 26) to stop the Obama administration from imposing regulations on greenhouse gases, giving a boost to President Obama as he pursues broader clean energy legislation, the Cap and Trade.

 

Senators turned back a resolution that would have rescinded the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

 

Supporters of the resolution, mostly Republicans, argued that the EPA had usurped the authority of Congress to set climate policy and that the EPA regulations would increase energy costs and kill jobs.

But the White House, which threatened to veto the measure, said depriving the EPA of its ability to regulate carbon and other greenhouse emissions.

 

If predictions are correct, energy costs are going to soar.  This is not what America needs to recover its economy.  This is a sad day in America.  We need to vote these people out!  America WAKE UP!

 

 

 

 

There They Go Again: Cap and Trade Bill Being Written Behind Closed Doors, Won't Go Through Open Committee Process

By: Mark Tapscott, WashingtonExaminer.com

 

Somewhere there must be a rule that whenever Washington politicians and bureaucrats say they are going to do one thing, the opposite will actually happen.

 

Consider, for example, the campaign for a Cap-and-Trade anti-global warming energy reform bill and the promise of President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders to conduct the public's business in public: In reality, they are writing and moving the bill forward behind closed doors in the Senate.

 

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-CN, who caucuses with Senate Democrats, told Energy & Environment reporter Darren Samuelson that he and fellow co-sponsors John Kerry, D-MA, and Lindsay Graham, R-SC, will not introduce their bill via the normal Senate process, but will instead simply hand it over to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV.

 

"If we introduce it, it'll get referred to committees," Lieberman said, reported Samuelson. "We want him to be able to work with it and bring it out onto the floor as a leader whenever he's ready."

 

That will leave Reid free to bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote whenever he chooses to do so.

 

The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman proposal is a "compromise" version of a bill that failed to get anywhere in the Senate, despite the best efforts of the Obama administration and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA.

 

Both bills establish an artificial government-run "market" in which companies buy and sell credits for lowering their carbon emissions. The bills also establish timetables to reduce total U.S. carbon emissions in the effort to reduce the alleged heating of the Earth's atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas.

 

Anybody see a pattern here? Where was the Obama stimulus program written? Behind closed doors. Where was Obamacare written? Behind closed doors. Where was the Obama-Dodd financial regulatory reform bill written? Behind closed doors.

 

No wonder odds are good this Congress may ultimately be best remembered for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's quip about Obamacare that "we have to pass it so you can see what's in it."

 

Yes, that's the same Nancy Pelosi who on election night after leading her party's 2006 successful campaign to regain a congressional majority after more than a decade in the minority promised to give the American people "the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history."

 

Senate Surrenders to the EPA

Washington Examiner Editorial
June 11, 2010

Fifty three of the Senate's 59 Democrats gave unelected, overpaid bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a green light yesterday to do pretty much whatever they choose in their quixotic crusade against global warming. All 41 Republicans and six brave Democrats voted for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's resolution nullifying the EPA's recent usurpation of authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the U.S. economy to combat greenhouse gases. Thankfully, this craven surrender of congressional authority isn't the last word on the issue, assuming that the November elections produce a Senate with enough backbone to reassert the legislature's rightful power.

 

In the meantime, it's vital to understand how bureaucracies function. Whatever else they may do, leading bureaucrats always do two things, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress: They limit choices available to the rest of us by imposing regulations that increase government power and thus justify expanding their budgets and staffs; and they protect themselves and their turf by suppressing internal dissent, often at any costs.

As an example of the latter, consider career EPA scientist Alan Carlin. Last year, Carlin went through all the proper channels in submitting a study to the EPA's top leadership in which he raised serious questions about the credibility of scientific reports used to justify the agency's decision to regulate greenhouse gases. Carlin's study became public thanks to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Carlin's reward was to be publicly pilloried by President Obama's EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. His work was suppressed within the agency, and he was threatened with additional retaliation if he continued voicing his views. Rather than endure this bureaucratic muzzling, Carlin retired.                     

 

Similarly, EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams -- a married couple living in San Francisco who between them have four decades of experience at the agency -- became so concerned last year about the EPA's support of cap-and-trade legislation that they created a YouTube video titled "The Huge Mistake" to explain their case. They made it clear that the video represented only their personal opinions, but the EPA still ordered them to change the video's content or face severe punishment.

 

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., predicts that a suffocating new round of EPA regulations will soon descend upon the "one-fifth of our restaurants, one-fourth of our schools, two-thirds of our hospitals and doctor's offices, 10 percent of our churches, thousands of farms and millions of small businesses" that emit greenhouse gases. Considering how the EPA grandees mistreat their underlings, we wonder how the agency will respond to the soon-to-be-swelling ranks of critics on the outside