Bureaucracy Wins Another Round

In a slightly reversed form of government disdain for private enterprise, the Senate on June 10 voted to hand exceptional power to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before it had even assumed the power for itself. The chances of the Obama administration getting a strong cap'n tax plan into acceptable legislative form this year have been diminishing for months now.

So rather than allow energy to be produced without governmental interference, the Senate refused to pass legislation limiting the power of the EPA to control carbon emissions. Hostility toward a sweeping cap 'n tax energy proposal has been more and more vocal as the statist tendencies of the Obamacrats have become ever more obvious to the average man in the street. Since the chances of passing such a bill have faded almost into obscurity, the left did the next best thing. It allowed the power of the people through their elected representatives to be passed on to career doctrinaire environmentalist bureaucrats.

Knowing what the Democrats were planning, Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski introduced a bill which would effectively have blocked the EPA from regulating carbon emissions and greenhouse gases utilizing current law. The greenie weenies were able to eke out a victory by defeating the measure on a 53 to 47 vote. But the vote was a sign of trouble to come for the regulators in both the Congress and the bureaucracy. Since the vote did not create any new powers for the already overly-powered EPA, it didn't require the Democrats to take the dangerous step of actually passing new and outrageously intrusive legislation. It was a reprehensible act of cowardice motivated purely by political forces, and a further confirmation of the delegation of power from elected representatives to faceless bureaucrats.

Yet no matter how pretty a face the Democrats tried to put on this power grab, it was clearly a desperation move. If they had the votes and the support of the general populace, they would have skipped this step entirely and gone on with the massive legislation they originally planned. More of a realist than some of her fellows, California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said "We need to pass a cap-and-trade bill. I think it can certainly get passed next year; it can't this year."

Congress could still pass legislation which controls carbon-pricing as early as July, but it won't be the sweeping powers that the left really wants over this huge segment of the economy. Democratic Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman have already broken the pricing scheme out of their revised proposed legislation, hoping that they can sneak the whole plan past the public piecemeal. The House version which did pass was too all-inclusive to get past the Senate, so a compromise version is now necessary. The soon-to-be ex-Senator Harry Reid had another one of his accidental truthful moments when he announced that the Democrats will force energy legislation early next year, but qualified his statement by saying "it won't be branded as cap-and-trade." Sorry, Senator, the smell of skunk doesn't become pleasant because you decided to rename it perfume.

The big glitch for the Democrats is that defeating legislation such as Murkowski's by a narrow partisan margin isn't going to work for the big bill. A strange 2007 Supreme Court decision determined that the EPA, with proper enabling legislation, could make independent determinations about the regulation of greenhouse gases, so the defeat of Murkowski's proposed bill didn't change anything. Pure cap 'n tax is another story entirely. Not only does it create and enumerate powers that never previously existed in the area of energy policy, but it requires the expenditure of huge sums of the public's money. That requires a sixty vote majority in the Senate, and the defection of seven Democrats on something as simple as Murkowski's proposal is an indication of a major rebellion later on.

For the new and massive cap 'n tax governmental takeover, the Democrats would have to pick up one Republican vote, and absolutely every single Democratic vote. That is unlikely in the extreme. First of all, skepticism about the relationship between carbon emissions and climate-change (formerly known as global warming) has reached epic proportions. Furthermore, even liberal Democrats in Congress are willing to go along with the idea that it would take at least two years for the research, creation of infrastructure, and preparation of training necessary to implement any kind of massive legislation in the energy arena.

Six Democrats sided with the Republicans on the Murkowski proposal. That was not fatal to a simple majority, but it would be the death knell for cap 'n tax in anything like its recently proposed manifestations, since it can't be passed if there is even one Democrat defection. Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia was one of the defectors on the Murkowski bill, and he has gone so far as to introduce a proposal that the EPA be restrained from exercising its now established power over greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources for two years. That proposal is very close to Murkowski's, except that unlike Murkowski's, it has an end date.

The important issue here, beside the obvious, is that Congress ought not ever to delegate such massive powers of determination, analysis, control of a major portion of the economy, and quasi-criminal enforcement to a bureaucracy which is not responsive to the will of the people. It is a questionable constitutional delegation of power (the Supreme Court decision made a much narrower determination), and it is certainly an anti-democratic proposal. The political camps break down into those who wish America could be more like Europe in its dependence on "professional" bureaucrats, and those who hold the Founders in high esteem for choosing not to be like Europe. I'm not sure about the short term, but in the long term, my money is on the side of the Founders.