This week, the U.S. Senate is expected to vote on a “resolution of disapproval,” sponsored by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from “enacting” controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door.The importance of this vote is difficult to exaggerate. Nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional system of separated powers and democratic accountability hangs in the balance.
The Murkowski resolution would overturn the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” a December 2009 rulemaking in which the agency concluded that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes that Congress never approved. America could end up with a regulatory regime more costly and intrusive than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without people’s representatives ever voting on it.
Unless stopped, the EPA will be in a position to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to the agency by Congress.
The Murkowski resolution puts a simple question squarely before the Senate: Who shall make climate policy? Her position is simply that climate policy is too important to be made by non-elected bureaucrats.
By issuing an endangerment finding, the EPA will deal itself into a position to control the economy — both mobile and stationary sources — for climate change purposes. Yet the Clean Air Act gives the EPA no such authority. Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1970, decades before global warming was even a topic of congressional debate. That is why phrases like “greenhouse gas,” “greenhouse effect,” and “global climate change” appear nowhere in the statute.
Liberals know that regulatory zealotry has a long history of trampling on constitutional principle, and many lawmakers would simply prefer to let the non-elected bureaucrats at the EPA take the heat for “enacting” costly climate policies.
Who shall make climate policy — lawmakers who must answer to the people at the ballot box OR politically unaccountable bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges appointed for life?
-The Senate is expected to vote on the Murkowski resolution this week. Nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional system of separated powers and democratic accountability hangs in the balance.-
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