Posted on 12/27/2013 2:16:32 PM PST by Kaslin
Former Durham, NC district attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred for withholding evidence from the defense and lying to the court in the trumped-up Duke lacrosse team rape case. Ex-Boston crime lab technician Annie Dookhan was prosecuted for faking test results and contaminating drug samples, to get accused dealers convicted. In both cases, charges against their victims were dismissed or are under review.
So how should we handle federal officials whove become unethical researchers and prosecutors determined to get convictions, basing their cases on esoteric circumstantial evidence, allowing tainted and fraudulent evidence, hiding exculpatory information, rewriting the law, and denying defense counsel the right to cross-examine adverse witnesses or present their case?
As the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow explains in its amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court, thats what Environmental Protection Agency regulators have been doing with global warming. Theyre pulling every dirty prosecutorial trick in the book, to convict fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, and Americas economy and living standards of endangering the public welfare.
Since 2009, EPA regulators have shown a single-minded determination to slash hydrocarbon use, drive up the price of energy, and impose huge costs on companies, industries and an economy struggling to stay afloat and retain jobs. They want to control CO2 emissions from vehicles, electrical generating plants, and eventually the sources of nearly everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do. The damage to our livelihoods, liberties, living standards, legal system, health, welfare and life spans will be enormous.
The devious dealings have continued under new EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who has pronounced that there is no more urgent threat to public health than climate change. Now it appears the mendacious malfeasance is even worse than previously thought.
Newly released emails reveal that Ms. McCarthy was very excited in 2010 to finally get the opportunity to work with Mr. John Beale, who for several years was the senior EPA policy advisor helping Ms. McCarthy and her Office of Air and Radiation develop and implement tough air quality and climate regulations. When he wasnt off on one of his Walter Mitty undercover CIA capers, that is.
Beale was just convicted of defrauding taxpayers out of $1 million in salaries and expenses for extended vacations that he took while claiming to be a high level intelligence operative. His attorney says he had a dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior and manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives.
It defies belief to suppose his dysfunctions and fabrications did not extend to his official EPA roles of devising agency air pollution and climate policies, then cherry picking reports and manipulating research to justify them. The criminal fraud for which Beale will serve 32 months in prison and repay $1.4 million is outrageous. The fraud on our economy, democracy and peoples lives is far more costly and despicable. Even worse, their regulatory fraud is a pervasive problem throughout EPA.
The Constitution specifies that the Executive Branch has no authority to engage in lawmaking, but must faithfully execute the laws as written and not as regulators might wish the laws had been written, to advance their preferred policy agendas. EPA has violated these most fundamental rules, ignoring inconvenient statutory language, and devising and enforcing other provisions out of whole cloth.
Between 1989 and 2010, Congress considered and rejected some 692 bills addressing various aspects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. So President Obamas EPA simply imposed carbon dioxide controls by executive fiat, using prevention of significant deterioration and new source performance standards to create new authority over coal-fired electrical generating plants. It then unilaterally changed precise statutory emission standards from 250 tons per year to 100,000 tpy to avoid the public backlash that would come if it began regulating and shutting down all the natural gas generators, refineries, cement kilns, factories, paper mills, shopping malls, apartment and office buildings, hospitals, schools and even large homes that emit more than 250 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Those job-killing rules can come later, when radical environmentalists sue radical regulators, to enforce the statutory requirement.
In circumventing Congress, rewriting laws and ignoring the separation of powers doctrine, EPA accomplished an unprecedented power grab over the energy that fuels our economy and makes our jobs, living standards and civil rights progress possible. It also flouted clear NEPA, Clean Air Act and other statutory mandates that EPA protect the health, welfare and environmental quality of all Americans.
The agency remains fixated on the speculative impacts of sea levels, storms, droughts and other manifestations of allegedly dangerous manmade climate change. As CFACTs amicus brief explains, it completely ignores the increasingly adverse effects that its boiler MACT, carbon dioxide and 1,9000 other Obama-era EPA regulations are having on companies, jobs, families, entire industries and communities and thus peoples physical, mental and emotional well-being.
As breadwinners are laid off or reduced to part-time status, families are unable to heat and cool their homes properly, pay bills, rent or mortgage, buy clothing and medicines, or take vacations. Increasing numbers of families deplete their savings and are made homeless. Being unable to find or keep a job erodes self-worth, self-confidence and psychological well-being. The stress of being unemployed, or involuntarily holding multiple lower-paying part-time jobs, means reduced nutrition, sleep deprivation, increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, higher incidences of depression and alcohol, drug, spousal and child abuse, more suicides and generally lower life expectancies.
It means the regulations are far worse than the harms they supposedly redress. For EPA to ignore this simple reality is illegal and unconscionable. For it to do so based on fraudulent science is outrageous.
The agencys position hardly reflected genuine climate science in 2009, when EPA decreed that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare. Since then, Earths temperature and weather events have refused to cooperate with EPAs dire predictions. But the agencys views and decisions remain etched in stone, leaving the agency on the extreme fringe of alarmist opinion, insisting that its views are supported by IPCC predictions that are increasingly discredited by Climategate revelations, investigations into IPCC practices, the Beale scandal and even an exhaustive report by one of EPAs own analysts.
When presented 37-year EPA veteran Alan Carlins analysis, his supervisor tried to suppress the paper and refused to forward it to the EPA group preparing the final report that would guide the endangerment decision. The supervisor told him: The administrator and administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.
Finally, even full compliance with EPAs destructive regulations would achieve zero benefits, because emissions from China, India and other rapidly developing countries will continue increasing total atmospheric GHG levels and because climate change is driven primarily by natural forces, not CO2.
For all these reasons, EPAs carbon dioxide endangerment decision must be reversed; its stationary source regulations must be scrapped; and the agency must be required to fully evaluate the consistently adverse effects of its regulatory edicts on human health, welfare and environmental quality. If the Supreme Court fails to do so, the House and Senate must reassert their Constitutional roles.
Otherwise the United States will steadily fall behind its international competitors. The health and well-being of Americans will increasingly suffer. And the Legislative and Judicial Branches will become mere bystanders to an unelected, unaccountable, agenda-driven Executive Branch.
the Legislative and Judicial Branches will become mere bystanders to an unelected, unaccountable, agenda-driven Executive Branch.
Is that not what we already HAVE?
There is no WILL BE about it.
Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime
- Lavrentiy Beria.
Good, I'm glad he got obama in there.
If Congress is such a bunch of gutless cowards and traitors that they will not impeach Traitorobama, and the people keep re-electing this pile of human excrement to Congress, then the future prospects for this country are not pleasant... deserved, but not pleasant.
Can’t wait until the same sort of crooks are in charge of deciding who gets what level of medical care. Whooeeee, I’m sure all of us registered on FR will be certain to get cutting edge medical care in a timely manner.
But Congress was only too happy to let agencies like the EPA make the laws as it allowed them to side step their responsibility to exercise the power of the purse. Nothing moves without the a stream of money floating it along.
Corzine is still walking free, until we out right prosecute and jail these criminals they will live above the law
Thanks for posting.
Exceptionally well written essay.
I had almost no knowledge of the details of this issue until I read this.
What good does it do to impeach that arrogant pos if the rats in the senate do not remove him?
“he has sent out swarms of Officers to eat out of our sustenance.”
The Demonrats in the Senate are traitors to the United States, but their hell-spawned treachery is no excuse for the House not to do its sworn duty.
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