EPA Rules Will Trump Your Rights

IBD Editorials ^ | December 30, 2010 | Staff

[Kaslin]

Environment: Ignoring both Congress and the voters, the Environmental Protection Agency starts the new year governing by decree with job-killing regulations. Take a deep breath, but if you exhale you're a polluter.

Cap-and-trade is dead, long live cap-and-trade in the form of regulations promulgated in the coming year by what George Orwell might call the Ministry of Environment. It claims that the Clean Air Act and a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 let the EPA regulate carbon dioxide as a planet-warming pollutant.

We recently commented on the EPA's recent commandeering of the permitting process from Texas, with which it is in a legal tussle over federalism, states' rights and the Constitution's enumeration of powers and who may exercise them.

The federal agency also plans to issue greenhouse gas permits in seven other states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Oregon and Wyoming.

The EPA held its fire, hoping a Democratic Congress would get cap-and-trade legislation through both houses. In April, 2009, Time magazine ran a piece titled "EPA'S CO2 Finding: Putting A Gun To Congress' Head." Last year the New York Times said that if Congress fails to ram through cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA should ram it down our throats. And so it did.

With Barack Obama's election, liberal hopes for cap-and-trade rose. But neither businessmen nor homeowners were buying it, especially after the data manipulation and fraud perpetrated by the U.N.'s IPCC, Britain's Climate Research Unit and even our own NASA.

[backwoods-engineer]

EPA Rules Will Trump Your Rights

Damn right they will. And nothing will be done about it, because the Republicans will go RIGHT BACK to 2005 without recourse to a flux capacitor, right back to "give the Democrats a reach-around" mode without even being wined & dined first, right back to musical committee chairs and hitting on Washington money whores.

Don't we get it yet? BUREAUCRACY TRUMPS THE REPUBLIC. The Machine is in place; rather than Big Brother, it's nameless faceless little-man's-disease academics who aren't even related to you. It's Cass Sunstein's boot stamping on Lincoln's beard, forever.

To borrow from B.T. Party, political-only solutions are a mere hologram of liberty.

[backwoods-engineer]

It is still a country of laws.

NO, it is not. It is a country of regulation spewed from nameless faceless bureaucrats who have never done anything real in their lives, other than take a crap, and they probably have other people do that for them.

[dcwusmc]

You wanna show me just where the Constitution authorizes anything even resembling an EPA? It has ZERO Constitutional critical or otherwise functions.

[steelyourfaith]

Thanx raptor22 !

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[Still Thinking]

You can kill the funding without the president (he can’t physically FORCE Congress to include funding) but dissolving the department would require a presidential signature and can’t be done till Obama’s replaced.

[rurgan]

The EPA etc. are abusing power.But that's partly because there is a gang of marxist/democrat criminals running the government.Democrats/liberals and even people on here blame Bush for everything but just in 2 little examples the EPA, and FCC we can see the difference between Bush and Obama. Bush never signed on the global warming treaties,laws etc. and the EPA under his command did not impose this global warming bs. Same for the FCC . Under Bush the FCC didn't try to censor the Internet using this Soros Funded net neutrality bs. But now under Obama the EPA will shut down the economy using a hoax called global warming as an excuse. The FCC will censor the Internet using the Soros/marxist funded fake research called net neutrality.

Obama should be impeached for this. But still the existence the the EPA and FCC are based on LAWS that democrat congresses passed under the cover of the liberal mainstream media monopoly.Repeal the environmental laws then it's easier to abolish the EPA. The EPA was formed to consolidate several environmental agencies that were enforcing the environmental laws passed by democrat Congresses. What about that don't you people understand? Do you have any idea how the government works or about the Constitution? : The executive branch executes the laws passed by Congress. That's U.S. government 101.

[rurgan]

Even if you do all that , abolish the EPA as you propose then there will still be 100 years of democrat environmental laws that a future President must enforce.

For example: We abolish the EPA .Yet there are still thousands of pages of marxist ,anti-capitalism enviromental laws like that species act or whatever. Someone or some agency has to do environmental impact studies etc. to enforce those laws, to make sure that no habitat of some insect or forest or whatever is “harmed” by a power plant or construction or factory etc.. Of course those are horrible laws but it is the President's duty to see that those laws are enforced.So these laws have to be repealed first.

Why don't people understand that it is laws that are the problem: case in point the 3000 page government socialist healthcare law just recently passed.

[Still Thinking]

Yes, there are a lot of environmental laws and yes, those do need to be addressed. But I disagree if you think the EPA isn't a problem unto itself. All these bureaucrats have to justify their existence and fill their days so they sit there promulgating regulations that have the force of law, and which were not passed by Congress.

Take CO2 for example. Public sentiment was such that Congress wouldn't declare it a pollutant, but the agency still did, and thinks that we're still obligated to abide by their regulations despite the fact that Congress chose not to act.

So there is value in reining in the enforcement agencies, even though part of the problem originates elsewhere. I see the argument for a non-political body to make some determinations in a technical field to avoid politicizing what is actually provable fact, but the way it's implemented it's like double jeopardy to our rights. If EITHER the political or administrative people want to shave away some of our rights, they get to just shave away. That's not right. Maybe the agency can make scientific findings and then submit them to Congress to be included in laws, then to be enforced by an executive agency but with no adding other things to regulate on their own say-so, but whatever, this way has to go.

[rurgan]

EPA alone is destroying America. Of course it's a huge problem. But it is the environmental laws that democrat Congresses passed in over 100 years that give the EPA any authority at all and that justify any existence of the EPA.

EPA is the symptom. The laws are the disease.

You get rid of the EPA then something else or some other agencies or agency will take its place because those laws have to be enforced by the executive branch, the President.

[Still Thinking]

Acknowledged. But you could get rid of part of the problem by prohibiting whatever agency is charged with enforcing the law from coming up with their own, when they’re too stupid or unpopular for Congress to be willing to pass them. That amounts to an end run around the people that fund their paychecks.

[backwoods-engineer]

What about that don't you people understand? Do you have any idea how the government works or about the Constitution? : The executive branch executes the laws passed by Congress. That's U.S. government 101.

Don't get pedantic with me again. I know how the government is SUPPOSED to work, and I can quote the Constitution book chapter and verse. What I am saying is that Congressional Republicans lack the will to stand up to Obama and the EPA.

[Glenn]

what WILL happen next

Nothing. We've been sucking it up for nearly 30 years and we will continue to suck it up. The government is faceless.

[SunkenCiv]

Ignoring both Congress and the voters, the Environmental Protection Agency starts the new year governing by decree with job-killing regulations. Take a deep breath, but if you exhale you're a polluter.

The EPA needs to be greatly reduced in size; we need to drill for petroleum, mine anthracite coal, and have a massive number of treason trials, convictions, and executions for the Constitution-trampling leftists -- not just those at the EPA -- who are trying to ruin us and our posterity. Thanks Kaslin.