Relentless Democrats Cook Up New Weapon Against Gas Stoves - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Relentless Democrats Cook Up New Weapon Against Gas Stoves
by

Never turn your back on the Left.  

Ever. 

When one thinks that the radical, woke Democrats have backed off, they actually are reloading. Their current insistence on fighting gas stoves, no matter what, has historical parallels. 

At one point, Obamacare looked as dead as a corpse on a marble slab. While still facing a lukewarm Congress, it appeared to smother itself in its own corpulence. Conservatives, including yours truly, sighed in relief as this monster essentially slayed itself. 

But then, like the villain in The Terminator, Obamacare resurrected itself. The anti-Obamacare forces returned to our battle stations. However, we could not overcome the headstrong, tungsten-tough determination of America’s socialists in lustful pursuit of their decades-old erotic fantasy: government medicine.

Soon, Democrats rammed Obamacare through the Senate on a 60–39 party-line vote on Christmas Eve 2009, no less. The House passed this enormous new entitlement, and Obama signed the “defeated” Obamacare into law. 

Likewise, President Joe Biden’s morbidly obese, $3.2 trillion Build Back Better monstrosity was dead and buried last spring, thanks to Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. (She subsequently declared herself an independent, although she caucuses with Democrats). Absent their support, this massive spend-o-rama cratered beneath its own grandiosity in the then-evenly divided Senate. Republicans relaxed and thanked Manchin and Sinema for officiating at Build Back Better’s funeral.

However, like one of those hands that claws its way out of the cemetery lawn in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, Build Back Better crawled from its casket as the leaner and perkier Inflation Reduction Act. While this was also a spendthrift nightmare, at a mere $485 billion, it was more Alfred Hitchcock than Mr. Creosote. The comparatively svelte proposal seduced Manchin and Sinema back into the profligate bed, and Build Back Better Jr. squeaked through the Senate, cleared the House, and scored Biden’s signature. 

Last week provided further proof that Democrats never take no for an answer. Their deviousness is exceeded only by what H.L. Mencken observed in journalists: “a rat-like cunning.” These characteristics confirm that they need to be watched around the clock, at the very least, and stomped on like rodents whenever possible.  

Case in point: The Democrat-Left’s new obsession with banning gas stoves — ostensibly because 12.7 percent of childhood asthma is “attributed to” cooking with gas. Even if true, this is not even a seventh of such cases.  

No one had heard such a thing until a dodgy study emerged, which was funded by the anti-global warming Rocky Mountain Institute. This revealed the real agenda: To deny Americans one more slice of joy, all in the name of “Climate!” 

And if childless adults must suffer to “save the children,” then all the better, the Left reckons. 

While California and at least 77 U.S. cities have limited or prohibited new gas stoves, the federal government has avoided this gang attack on basic freedom and consumer choice.  

And then came fall. 

On Oct. 26, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) convened remotely. The minutes for that meeting featured 15 different references to natural gas. The CPSC approved Commissioner Richard L. Trumka Jr.’s Amendment 3A: “By March 1, 2023, staff will prepare and submit to the Commission a Request for Information (RFI) to seek public input on hazards associated with gas stoves and proposed solutions to those hazards.” 

Trumka, the late union boss’ son, cranked this fire to a full boil last month when he told Bloomberg that gas stoves are “a hidden hazard.” He added: “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” 

“A US federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves,” CNN declared on Jan. 11. From dinner-making moms to executive chefs to single guys who fry bacon, Americans decried Washington’s unjust War on Gas Stoves. 

The White House felt the heat and then saw the light. It swiftly distanced Biden from Trumka and the CPSC’s gasophobic busybodies. 

“The president does not support banning gas stoves,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre assuaged journalists that day. “And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.” 

Phew!  

That was close. 

Reports of the death of the gas stove clearly were exaggerated. 

With that risk at least off of the federal radar, folks could return to scrambling eggs in gas-heated skillets and, at worst, fight such tyranny at the state and local levels. 

And the American people lived happily after. 

No such luck. 

The Bidenites couldn’t keep their creeping totalitarianism in their trousers for even a month. 

Exactly three weeks after disgusted Americans pried Uncle Sam’s sticky fingers from their gas stoves, the feds resumed their usual freedom-crushing tricks. 

While a federal ban, per se, is on the back burner (for now), Biden and his fellow Bolsheviks have cooked up a fresh scheme to foil these basic appliances, which Americans have enjoyed since 1826

“Gas Stoves Are Back Under Scrutiny,” Bloomberg headlined Ari Natter’s Feb. 1 report. Rather than let the CPSC do its dirty work, Biden and his comrades tapped the Energy Department to restrict a woman’s right to choose to use a gas stove. (And ditto for men.) Rather than forbid them, Bloomberg explained, these bureaucrats would establish “first-of-their-kind limits on energy consumption for the stoves.”  

Karen Harbert, president of the American Gas Association, said: “We are concerned that this is another attempt by the Federal government to use regulations to remove viable and efficient natural gas products from the market.” 

Jill Notini of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers was even more ominous. “This approach by DOE could effectively ban gas appliances,” she told Bloomberg. “We are concerned this approach could eliminate fully featured gas products.”  

Based on AHAM’s initial analysis, Notini said “it appears” that 95 percent of gas stoves on the market would become ensnared in the Energy Department’s freshly spun red tape. 

Biden and his fellow Climatarians are desperate to deprive Americans of gas stoves. Heaters, water heaters, and everything else that burns gas are in their crosshairs. 

The Left never stops concocting new schemes to control and bark orders at the American people. Nothing else sends them soaring to greater heights of ecstasy.  

So, once again, regular folks cannot keep their eyes off of these tyrants, even for a second.  

The Republican House immediately should adopt legislation to prevent federal bureaucrats from spending any official time or taxpayer dollars to ban, reduce, or otherwise hinder natural gas appliances, pipelines, connections, or any other gas-powered consumer or commercial product or service.  

Meanwhile, everyday Americans should tell Biden, the Democrat Party, and the rest of their Climatarian co-religionists: “Take your War on Gas, shove it all the way up, and then twist it sideways — good and hard — until you feel our pain!” 

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.

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