The Wall Street Journal has a piece today that focuses on how Obama’s EPA is trying to use the threat of regulating carbon emissions through the Clean Air Act to encourage businesses to get on board for cap-and-trade legislation as the lesser of two evils. It’s outrageous of course, especially since studies have shown that the cap-and-trade bill would result in more job loss (just what the economy needs right now) for essentially no environmental benefit.
But beyond the whole specific cap-and-trade and global warming hysteria angle, people should be concerned about this as another example of Washington run amock. An agency feels free to just make up new powers for itself, rewrite the parameters of how they justify those powers to avoid an “absurd” result, all without any input from the people’s representatives in Congress? This isn’t how the legislative (or regulatory) process is supposed to work, and people–both liberals and conservatives–should be outraged by this misuse of federal power.