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The Spectacle Blog
“‘When Congress resists action on pressing environmental issues, regulation provides a way forward,’ said Thomas E. Lovejoy, University Professor in Science and Public Policy at George Mason University.”
So sayeth environmental sage if constitutional naïf Thomas E. Lovejoy at George Mason in today’s WaPo piece “EPA vows to enforce curbs on emissions”. Possibly you are wondering what curbs on emissions they will ‘enforce’, what with the legislation proposing them having been rejected in Congress after the public got wind of things?
Whatever. Surely you remember this dynamic from civics class, or even some more advanced inquiry into our system: Congress only decides major domestic policy issues until unelected bureaucrats and political appointees decide they can no longer wait for our elected representatives.
Like (as the article also notes) the Department of Interior is for locking up land when Congress resists doing so, the FCC is for when Congress resists action on the Progressives’ view of the internet, and so on through the alphabet soup of government. This must be what the media is praising as Obama’s move to the center, his moderation, his version of triangulation recognizing the new political reality. Or something.
Oblivious to the system our Founders created as this, and Mr. Lovejoy, may be, one cannot say the activist academic hasn’t noticed the reality in the courts, and what administrative law has become. So, sadly, he has a point. If one calling for long-overdue outrage.
It is assertions like Lovejoy’s, and Obama’s ‘there are other ways to skin that cat’ of the global warming agenda, than just going through Congress with the doomed cap-n-trade, that beg to serve as this year’s ‘necessarily skyrocket.’
Let’s hope the new oversight sheriffs take their task seriously.
View all comments (22) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Chris Horner
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/12/24/epa-for-when-congress-resists
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Ken (Old Texican)| 12.24.10 @ 9:30AM
Chris,
When you used the term "oversight Sheriffs", are you meaning the Congress?
I surely hope so.
2011 is going to be fascinating and frightening too.
Will our new House of Reps. turn off the funds to these communsists, (pardon the shorthand), who are practicing "lawfare/warfare" against us?
Until the House ACTS definitively, business, (and working capital), will sit on the sidelines, and the heartbreak of unnecessary recession will be draped around our shoulders.
Business needs solid long-term tax and regulation security. Given that, our economy will come roaring back if we can keep terrorism/Sharia in the lock-up.
JP| 12.24.10 @ 9:44AM
The only thing missing from the Professor's ides is the fact that ultimately Congress can indict and imprison those who disobey its laws - the President inclusive. Funny thing the authority vested in Congress. Perhaps its time the GOP begns to flex its muscles.
PattyMor| 12.24.10 @ 9:56AM
After seeing the lame duck session operate, I have lost confidence in the RepubuRat party. Do you think this bunch of weenies will resist the tyranny? After all, they just voted a federal take over the food supply. Stock up now, as food is going to get very expensive.
mwl| 12.24.10 @ 10:58AM
The logical response from the House is this:
EPA funding: $0.
BLM funding: $0.
A Conservative Teacher | 12.24.10 @ 11:46AM
A stronger president, a stronger bureaucracy, and a more active judiciary all mean that political power if rapidly flowing away from the people and their most elected branch, Congress, towards unelected, appointed, long-term, solitary rulers. America slides backwards under Democrats and liberals.
jgo| 12.24.10 @ 12:29PM
I hope the 112th congress will enact some reforms, but I fear we'll get more of the same unconstitutional perversions as the 111th.
And Obama is likely to veto any reforms, anyway.
Richard Baker| 12.24.10 @ 12:32PM
mwl:
Agreed. Zero their budgets and watch the fun.
Occam's Tool| 12.26.10 @ 3:43PM
If I'm not mistaken, the money to fund the EPA must come through a Tea Party dominated House. Zero them. Zero every Damn Liberal thing. The NEA. PBS. EPA. Dept. of Energy and Education.
bobmontgomery| 12.24.10 @ 1:18PM
The brutal, open and honest thuggish arrogance of Lovejoy in describing how to overcome the law-making body, not that we already didn't have a pretty good idea, is an abomination. An incitement to lawlessness on the part of the government is no less criminal than an incitement to lawlessness on the part of the citizenry. Eventually, lawlessness will be met with ..............lawlessness.
C.K. Amos| 12.24.10 @ 9:32PM
"An incitement to lawlessness on the part of the government is no less criminal than an incitement to lawlessness on the part of the citizenry. Eventually, lawlessness will be met with ..............lawlessness."
Agree.
It seems that this administration and its fascistic minions in agencies such as EPA will push hard and continuously until they are stopped.
Given now that elections--e.g., Scott Brown and the recent 2010 shellacking in November--mean nothing to the Democrats, liberals and leftists in Congress, the agencies and the White House, it's looking like that physical intervention is all that these fascists will understand.
Richard Baker| 12.24.10 @ 2:18PM
bob:
I'd suggest you read Mr. Jefferson on the subject of dealing with tyranny.
MarkJ| 12.24.10 @ 2:45PM
"'When Congress resists action on pressing environmental issues, regulation provides a way forward,' said Thomas E. Lovejoy, University Professor in Science and Public Policy at George Mason University."
I recall some dude in Germany said pretty much the same thing about the Reichstag in 1933.
GoFigure| 12.24.10 @ 3:03PM
Lovejoy should go to his economics mentor (or should have been) at GWU before making such sweeping statements, namely Walter Williams.
Osamas Pajamas| 12.24.10 @ 9:18PM
I advocate the violent overthrow of the regulatory state. These usurpers of Congressional constitutional authority should be horsewhipped until they are dead, set ablaze with gasoline, and pixxed on to put the fire out.
Osamas Pajamas| 12.24.10 @ 9:20PM
What this country needs is an armed insurrection, and a good, five-cent cigar.
Tenn Slim| 12.25.10 @ 9:00AM
The answer to the above EPA, Alphabet soup agency grab for power.
Congress delete the appointees salary from the current budget. No money, no agency Leftists.
Folks, we have a Civil Servant 5th estate problem.
Until the Czars, the 2nd and 3rd level Appointees are UNFUNDED, the beat to the Left will go on.
end
Larry| 12.25.10 @ 12:16PM
Two things must happen. First, the courts must end their ordinary deference to Federal administrative rulings. If the bureaucrats are going to make policy decisions in lieu of Congress, it is the only natural thing to do. Second, EPA must be radically reformed and restructured to eliminate branches of the agency whose sole charge is to find and develop new policies and new environmental issues to grind the ax on. EPA needs to spend its time protecting the environmental gains made and enforcing the reasonable laws that are on the books, as opposed to creating new fraudulent catastrophes as instruments to destroy the economy and take us back into the Middle Ages.
Leonid| 12.25.10 @ 2:22PM
As the obama's instrument of the US economy degradation EPA must be abolished.
PattyMor| 12.25.10 @ 12:42PM
The whole regulatory state needs to be dismantled. There is simply no constitutional authority for it. The EPA is only one example of the tyranny. But it runs through the TSA, BLM, Interior, and most of the others.
The power needs to given back to the states and/or free market solutions. But the Rent Seekers in big business like a stacked deck. So here wer are staring at tyranny as they pat your private parts and reduce you to a hunk of meat.
Stan Redmond| 12.25.10 @ 12:51PM
" When Congress resists action... "
I think we have a winner for Obama's campaign slogan.
Pray our new republican majority in the house has the fortitude to stand up to the tyranny we are facing.
FeARLESS bEAR| 12.25.10 @ 1:33PM
The EPA regulation of so-called greenhouse gasses is the ultimate tool for the deconstruction of private enterprise and the death of the economy. Based, as it surely is, on unsound science and faux models that assume what is to be proved, the EPA iis leading the charge of the utterly dumbed down toward the cliff of societal suicide. They are so progressive they no longer know the difference between fact and fiction.
Susan Grant| 12.25.10 @ 5:06PM
Lisa Jackson of the EPA does NOT have any education to qualify to run the EPA, therefore the idiotic decisions that are coming out of that area. Lisa Jackson is also the person for the 11 deaths on the Deepwater Horizon rig, as she awarded a 'security waiver' that allowed the rig to bypass normal security precautions, that could and would have prevented the explosion and the 11 lives lost. Will she be called to answer for her gigantic blunder, not as long as Barack HUssein Sotero Obama is 'protecting' her.She wasn't placed in charge of the EPA because sheknow anything about the environment, she was put there to assist with the ongoing destruction of OUR economy. She knows ZERO about the environment, and only does what she is told to do by the 'faux' president. Hopefully they will all be brought up on charges and we will finally be able to get them out of Washington and stop their continuing path of destruction.