On Tuesday, the House passed a bill that shouldn’t even have been necessary. And, naturally, that bill has no chance for passage in Chuck Schumer’s Senate.
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The bill is the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act, and it’s an attempt by the House Republicans to put a stop to the next round of meddling — molestation, really, like Joe Biden around the kids until the staffers pry him away — by the runaway bureaucrats at the Department of Energy and other agencies in all of your modern conveniences.
There’s something deeply pathological about a political party that simply can’t abide your dishwater — or water heater or washing machine or toilet or shower heads or stove — working like you’d like it to.
Maybe “pathological” isn’t even the word. “Psychotic” is more like it.
They’ve largely ruined all of those appliances with idiotic regulations designed to save energy or water that were not in a shortage, offering grandiose justifications like: “We’re saving the planet.”
Nobody believes these things, and the Democrats and their functionaries in those useless federal agencies certainly don’t. This is about power — power over you and your family, power over the economy, power over manufacturing and international trade. Stupid regulations are mere contrivances to get that power, because a government that tightly regulates a thing may then squeeze the manufacturers of that thing for whatever corrupt purposes the people in charge of that government might desire.
And the squeezing must continuously increase, or else the folks might get more comfortable.
Rep. Debbie Lesko, a Republican representing the Phoenix suburbs, authored this bill last year to attempt to fight off a new round of squeezing. On Tuesday, Lesko got all of the Republicans and even seven of the Democrats to come aboard to pass it:
The bill … “modifies the process by which the Department of Energy (DOE) amends, revokes, or implements energy conservation standards for certain consumer products (other than automobiles), such as household appliances,” according to an official summary of the legislation.
The legislation was introduced after the Biden Administration’s Energy Department proposed a rule that would have led to a ban on the sale of about half of the gas stoves currently on the market.
“My constituents in the north and northwest valley of Maricopa County, Arizona, do not want this government interference in their homes and lives,” Lesko told reporters on Tuesday, per Fox News. “I know that millions of Americans around the country feel the same way.”
Lesko said she was “saddened” that the bill was necessary in a statement, and slammed the Biden administration for imposing new regulations on common appliances. The bill, if passed by the Senate, would force the DOE to consider the cost-effectiveness of new policies, such as how updates affecting home appliances would hit low-income families.
“No government bureaucrat should ever scheme to take away Americans’ appliances in the name of a radical environmental agenda,” Lesko added.
Regrettably, this bill won’t go any further than another piece of legislation Lesko authored last year — that one aimed specifically at stopping the Biden appliance molesters from coming after your gas stove. Schumer wouldn’t even bring that bill up for a vote, and he won’t bring this one up either.
It’s an election year. You’d think throwing ordinary Americans a bone would be something the Democrats would do, passing a bill like this and offering it up as an example of how they’re for giving Joe Six-Pack a break. But it seems they’re too far gone for that.
So much so that some of them are being outright jerks about the subject. Here was Pete Aguilar, chair of the House Democrat Caucus, on the House floor while the bill was being debated: “Liberty for laundries, freedom for refrigerators. I mean, these are unserious issues.”
Oh, OK. As though it wasn’t Aguilar’s pals who created the problem by attacking your home appliances in the first place.
And as though practically every appliance repairman you talk to won’t advise you to hang on to your old appliances whenever possible because the new ones have been de-engineered thanks to the Democrats’ stupid regulations.
Years ago when he was a freshman senator, Rand Paul perfectly voiced the irritation of the American people when he got an opportunity to grill some faceless, clueless bureaucrat about the declining quality of home appliances thanks to the feverish ministrations of the feds:
That’s what Lesko’s bill attempts to push back against.
And, honestly, it doesn’t even go very far in doing that. The bill doesn’t roll back the regulations Paul was complaining about. All it does is attempt to stop things from getting worse. But the same busybody appliance molesters will inform you that it’s for your own good that you should have no gas stove, nor a dishwasher that actually, y’know, gets the dishes clean:
Susan Dudley leads the George Washington University Regulatory Study Center. She says the bill could have a positive impact on consumers because it stops the Department of Energy from automatically setting new standards every six years.
“The problem with the process is that you’re always setting new standards, again based on projections,” Dudley says, “without setting standards based on what’s actually happening.”
The White House is defending its strategy. A recent statement from the Office of Management and Budget says the energy standards in question save customers money.
According to OMB estimates, an average U.S. household is saving $321 per year in utility bills. They expect savings to increase with time.
Yeah, right. Saving compared to what?
One promise Republicans running for the House and Senate should make this fall is that all of the federal government’s regulations on consumer appliances and other household equipment will come in for a thorough and unfriendly review.
Cretins like Aguilar can laugh all they want and call it unserious. But what’s unserious is the army of utterly worthless Karens at the Department of Energy and other federal agencies who can’t leave regular people well enough alone in our own houses.
It was 13 years ago that Paul complained about toilets that don’t flush. There’s actually a black market in old-style toilets that do. Nothing has been done about this idiocy, and it’s only getting worse as the people responsible for it laugh at our inconvenience.
Let’s hope they aren’t laughing anymore a year from now. What’s needed is a lot more aggressive reform than Lesko’s bill Schumer will flush down the Senate’s commode, but it’ll take a wipeout election to make that possible.
