10:01 a.m.
ET: According to
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, Henry Waxman just tacked on
another 300 pages in the dead of night! This monstrosity
is like one of those 1950s sci-fi creatures that just keeps
growing and growing . . .
PREVIOUSLY
(8:53 a.m.): Such is the feverish haste with
which Democrats are trying to rush
Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade through the House that, as with
the $787 "stimulus," they're preparing to vote on a
1,000-plus-page bill that none of them have read.
According to the
Sunlight Foundation, on June 19, when the bill was placed on
the House calendar, it was 964 pages. By Monday, when it was
submitted to the House Rules Committee, it was 1,201 pages. Rep.
Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) has noted that
the bill bypassed key committees, and none other than Rep.
Charles Dingell (D-Mich.) has described it as a "huge tax."
Given this situation, the hurry to ram through the
"massive job-killer" can only be compared to lemmings rushing
toward a cliff. If Nancy Pelosi can impose party discipline,
Democrats will find themselves under intolerable pressure to vote
"yes" and the lemming impulse will prevail. But, as with the
stimulus bill, no Republican should join this lemming rush.
Opponents of Waxman-Markey are praying that they can find enough
"Blue Dog" Democrat votes to stop the bill. Yet the lemming
impulse of the Democrats toward mass suicide could be so powerful
that many House members will sign their own political death
warrants today. Maybe some of these Democrats should talk to
George "Buddy" Darden, the Democrat who representated the Seventh
District of Georgia until he allowed himself to be talking into
voting for Bill Clinton's gun-grabbing "crime bill" in
1994.
Legislative haste of the sort exemplified by H.R. 2454
contradicts the advice of our Founders. Smitty, a
military man of constitutionalist persuasion
who helps me out at my personal blog, was moved
today to quote James Madison's
famous expression of the rule of law:
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made
by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that
they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be
understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are
promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who
knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be
to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can
that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Sheer regard for political self-preservation may produce enough
Democratic "no" votes today to stop Waxman-Markey. If not, the
repeal of this disastrous legislation should be the first
campaign promise of every Republican challenger in 2010.
