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Government by
Regulations Instead of Laws and Treaties

by Phyllis Schlafly

December 3, 2010

Phyllis
Schlafly

Republicans are assuming that Cap-and-trade (a.k.a. Cap-and-tax) is
dead because Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid lacks the votes to bring
up the House-passed bill and because this issue proved a loser in the 2010
House races. Like the famous Mark Twain saying, its death may be
exaggerated.

The Senate's environmentalism expert, Jim Inhofe (R-OK), warns us that
the Obama Administration is trying to implement Cap-and-trade anyway by
bureaucratic regulations. Directives issued by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) are coming down the pike to increase energy costs
and kill jobs.

Last May, the EPA issued what it called a tailoring rule to govern new
power plants, oil refineries and factories that yearly emit 100,000 tons
or more of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons,
perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride. Inhofe reports that this
tailoring rule will further reduce our manufacturing base and especially
hurt the poor and elderly.

Inhofe predicts that the EPA standards planned for commercial and
industrial boilers will cost 798,000 jobs. He also warns about the harmful
effects on jobs caused by new rules on ozone emissions.

Since Obama moved into the White House, the EPA has proposed or
finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. The EPA is, for
the first time, simultaneously toughening the regulations on all six major
traditional pollutants such as ozone and sulfur dioxide.

Before Climategate exposed the politics behind the "science" of global
warming, a 5-4 Supreme Court ordered the EPA to consider regulating
emissions based on that unsubstantiated and now largely discredited
theory.

Despite a long record of supporting Obama stimulus and spending
legislation, the expected chair of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), says "we are not going to allow this
administration to regulate what they have been unable to legislate."

Opposition to EPA's new rules is remarkably bipartisan. Seventeen
Democrats signed a letter to EPA Director Lisa Jackson opposing the new
rules.

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) was elected after running a TV ad showing
himself firing a rifle to put a bullet through a copy of the cap-and-trade
bill, and he promised to fight EPA attempts to curb greenhouse gas
emissions from coal-fired power plants. He may have a difficult task
because EPA Director Jackson is plotting to force mass retirements of the
coal plants that provide half of U.S. electricity.

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EPA's aggressive
overregulation is forcing the electric industry to choose between
continuing to operate while taking on major capital costs of complying
with heavy new burdens, or closing down and building new plants that use
more expensive sources such as natural gas. The public will surely end up
paying higher electric rates (a.k.a. a big tax increase).

The ObamaCare law was deviously designed to take decision-making away
from our elected representatives and give it to 15 "expert" members of the
Obama-appointed Independent Payment Advisory Board. Many provisions of
this law prohibit Congress from repealing or changing decisions of the
"experts."

The Obama Administration is using administrative regulations to
implement what is known as Card Check, which even the Democratic Congress
refuses to legislate. Obama's recess appointee to the National Labor
Relations Board, Craig Becker, has lined up a 3-to-2 Board majority to
repeal the rule that requires secret ballots in unionization elections.

Currently, a secret ballot of workers is mandated in order to unionize
a company. Becker's new regulation will eliminate that workers' right and
make them subject to coercion and bullying to induce them to vote Yes on a
card visible to union bosses.

The Obama Administration is also toying with a plan to substitute
administrative regulations for treaties. Several years ago, the Council on
Foreign Relations fingered the treaty provision of the U.S. Constitution
as its most objectionable section, and now an ex-Clinton Administration
State Department bureaucrat, James P. Rubin, has floated a New York Times
op-ed suggesting that treaties are not "worth the trouble anymore" and we
should substitute domestic regulations.

The globalists find it inconvenient that our Constitution requires a
two-thirds Senate vote for treaty ratification. Horrors! That, they say,
causes "international frustration" with America.

This frustration broke into print because there are not enough Senate
votes to ratify the New START Treaty that Obama signed with Russia.
Rubin's solution is to ditch the ratification process and substitute
executive agreements and pronouncements.

Rubin reminds us that after it became clear the Senate was not going to
ratify a climate-change treaty, Obama just used EPA regulations, and so we
can do likewise with arms-control treaties. Let's just ignore the
Constitution and let Obama bureaucrats make all important decisions.

Read previous Phyllis
Schlafly columns

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