Republicans were in an “Internet uproar” last week over a false report that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had called them “jack-booted thugs.” Meanwhile, deeply troubling statements that EPA officials did make have hardly stirred a ripple in the blogosphere.

At a recent hearing before a House oversight panel, three Obama administration witnesses — National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Administrator David Strickland, EPA Assistant Air Administrator Gina McCarthy, and EPA Transportation and Air Quality Director Margo Oge – denied under oath that motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards are “related to” fuel economy standards. In so doing, they denied plain facts they must know to be true. They lied to Congress.

House Government Oversight and Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) put it more diplomatically: “Your statements under oath misrepresented the relationship between regulating greenhouse gases and regulating fuel economy.” By “obstinately insisting” that regulating greenhouse gases and fuel economy are “separate and unrelated endeavors,” the officials “impede the Committee’s important oversight work.”

Why did they “misrepresent” and “impede”? Had the officials answered truthfully, they would have to admit that California’s greenhouse gas motor vehicle emissions law, AB 1493, which EPA approved in June 2009, violates the Energy Policy Conservation Act’s (EPCA) express preemption of state laws or regulations “related to” fuel economy. The officials would also have to admit that EPA is effectively regulating fuel economy, a function outside the scope of its statutory authority.

Strongly Related

That greenhouse gas emission standards implicitly regulate fuel economy is evident from the agencies’ own documents. As EPA and NHTSA acknowledge in their joint May 2010 Greenhouse Gas/Fuel Economy Tailpipe Rule (pp. 25424, 25327), no commercially available technologies exist to capture or filter out carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from motor vehicles. Consequently, the only way to decrease grams of CO2 per mile is to reduce fuel consumption per mile — that is, increase fuel economy. Carbon dioxide constitutes 94.9% of vehicular greenhouse gas emissions, and “there is a single pool of technologies… that reduce fuel consumption and thereby CO2 emissions as well.”

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From The Washington Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog said Wednesday the Obama administration cut corners in evaluating the science it used to back up its finding that carbon is a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated under existing federal law.

The report by the EPA’s inspector general is certain to be used in court by those seeking to overturn EPA’s claim that it can write global-warming rules under existing law and doesn’t need new authority from Congress.

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A lead story in Wednesday’s trade press publication E&E Daily was “Energy, fighting EPA at the core of GOP jobs agenda”. This is true, but also reveals what may be the greatest gap between Obamanomics and an approach to governance that most Republicans claim to support:

• Obama treats the energy sector like a centrally planned jobs program, putting the boot on the neck of the stuff that works while ‘creating’ politically desired but economically unsustainable positions making politically desired but economically undesirable products. Republicans argue that if wind- and solar-powered electricity, pioneered in the 1890s, work then they will work but in the meantime creating jobs in the energy sector means getting your boot off the neck of the stuff that works.
• Obama and his team have long argued that their costly regulations will actually create jobs. Of course, every program, regulation and even hurricane “creates jobs”, just not on net. The administration either doesn’t get ‘net’, or thinks you will be persuaded by ‘the seen’ and imagine there is no unseen.

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson embarked upon a campaign to advance these absurd arguments in February, arguing that, e.g., if she adopts a rule requiring you to do something costly or even prematurely destroy capital, why, you’ll have to hire someone to do it!

The WSJ accurately characterized this philosophy: “In other words, the government should harm an industry and force it to ruin working assets so maybe other people can clean up the mess.”

Obama administration “green jobs” emissary Jackson also said these will require many more new environmental regulators. Yes, she said that, risible dogma that was repeated by administration apologists as recently as this week on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. So they aren’t giving up on it.

Except… On the Friday before this past long holiday weekend, President Obama somewhat buried a rational decision if a decision, like Thursday’s speech announcing Son of Stimulus, rooted entirely in his own political needs.

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Last week, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and a number of other Congressmen with states who rely heavily on energy production for economic stability, sent a letter to EPA head Lisa Jackson expressing some concerns over her agency’s impartiality. At the heart of their complaints, a series of backdoor regulations the EPA has put into place in recent months: regulations that are not only harming American energy industries, but which are actively destroying jobs in a already troubled economy.

Now, the EPA doesn’t seem to mind that it wields extensive power that it’s using to change the very fabric of the American financial system, but residents of states whose economies are dependent on energy job growth – and the leaders of these industries – are starting to see a problem.

Before, it might have just been industries that environmentalists considered “problematic,” but a recent EPA rule is about to put a wrench in the operations of nearly every carbon-dioxide-expelling creature or industry on the planet. The National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone, part of the Clean Air Act, currently demands that ozone emissions be limited to 75 parts per billion. That standard was put into place only two years ago, and companies are only now beginning to come into compliance. Instead of allowing industries to meet this standard, though, the EPA immediately moved the goalposts: they are now considering standards that would limit ozone emissions to only 70 or, more stringent yet, 60 parts per billion.

Apart from economic and social context, these numbers seem meaningless. But consider this: if the EPA were to choose the lesser of the standards, 70 parts per billion, only 24% of the 675 US counties who monitor ozone would be in compliance. If the bar were lowered to 60 parts per billion, only 4% of counties would make the cut. All of the areas that didn’t meet the standard would become subject to strict EPA scrutiny, as well as billions in fees and fines. Some of the more egregious offenders might even lose federal highway funding, and find themselves under the never-ending watchful eye of Lisa Jackson’s already-intrusive environmental watchdogs.

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Despite a small glimmer of hope from last Friday’s unemployment rate drop to 9.1%, business leaders know nearly all other economic figures continue to point to an anemic recovery or worse, a double-dip recession.

In reaction to the jobs numbers, Home Depot co-founder, Bernie Marcus had this to say on Politico:

While some may be relieved at today’s jobs numbers, the reality is that our economy is struggling to recover. And a big reason for that is the federal government. The impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It’s become stifling.

And this is a theme that business leaders continue to make: over-burdensome regulations from Washington are stifling the economy and preventing serious job growth while the Obama administration only continues to make the problem worse.

Lets take a look at the cold hard numbers. In the past few weeks, major American companies had to announce more layoffs:

- Borders – 400 stores will close, costing almost 11,000 jobs.

- Boston Scientific – Announced restructuring that will cost up to 1,400 jobs.

- Goldman Sachs – Will let go 1,000 employees, or nearly 3 percent of their workforce.

- Merck – Will layoff 13,000 workers to cut costs.

- State Street – Announced it will cut 850 jobs, in a second round of layoffs within a year.

With all of this going on, President Barack Obama is promising (yet another) renewed focus on job creation. But what is his administration doing? Contrary to Obama’s promised regulatory reform from earlier this year, the administration continues to say one thing and do another.

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The Senate will, one presumes, finally vote either this week or next to block EPA from imposing President Obama’s ‘other way to skin the cat’ of Kyoto-style energy rationing, by using the Clean Air Act – a law that EPA’s own public filings inescapably acknowledge was never intended for such purpose. What will be at stake is little less than the rule of law itself.

Policy sanity also stands to take a beating, or else gain a new lease on life. The United States derives over 80% of its total energy from the three fossil fuels now being regulated by the Clean Air Act on the basis of EPA’s Endangerment Finding, which by design strangles our ability to use them.  Further, the Obama Administration has in effect decided that the EPA knows how to run the U. S. economy.

With über-green Germany, even nuke-happy France, appearing set to ramp up their coal use in the wake of Japan’s nuclear incident, the first rational response would be to call off EPA’s war on coal. Not to fight like mad to preserve and advance it.

But fight like mad to preserve and advance this war on coal is what the administration and its Senate enablers are doing.

And as George Mason University professor of science and public policy Thomas Lovejoy said in an astonishing admission to the Washington Post not long ago, in the context of this very Obama Power Grab:

“When Congress resists action on pressing environmental issues, regulation provides a way forward”.

Actually, no. Our Constitution – so quaint and outdated according to certain quarters though it may be (it’s still better than whatever it is we have today) – makes it quite plain that it is only when Congress decides to act that agencies have a way forward.

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Fashioning good legislative policy (so that laws that we enact garner maximum respect from the public) requires, as we have seen from its absence in the prior Congress, patience and compromise.  A party with electoral control over both chambers of Congress and the presidency can probably pass a bill into law, but you rarely can get everything you want if the goal is to maximize a national consensus.  Mr. Obama and his Democratic majority claim to have gotten much of their agenda through, but until the president was forced to engage in coalition building in the lame duck session, as a result of the November 2 “shellacking” taken by his party, most of the bills supported only by the far left are under attack by the new Congress and the courts.  And even if the GOP cannot either dismantle the monstrous health care and financial “reform” laws that were passed or be successful in court challenges, we will be left with years of anger, recrimination, and confusion arising out of multi‑thousand page laws that no member of Congress even read.

Instead our elected leaders have left it, largely, to unelected bureaucrats appointed by the current Administration to write detailed regulations to determine how to interpret and enforce the so‑called “will” of the same Congress that never read or understood what they passed.  We have seen alarming portents of this in recent pronouncements by regulatory agencies as to their intent when final regulations are promulgated.  The regulations, as we have seen from the  public pronouncements show no real effort to determine that intent but rather are designed to enact the agenda of the far left which the Democrats, even with their large congressional majority, could not pass.  The common thread is to transfer more control of the private sector to the government, to redistribute wealth and dismantle or exercise unprecedented control over the industries that are in their crosshairs.  This is not alarmist rhetoric; it is simply sad fact.  For them the ends justify the means.

Take this example.  Because of alarm that Sarah Palin’s so‑called “death panels” would scuttle the healthcare legislation; end-of-life counseling was dropped from the health care bill.  Frankly, we think the term “death panels” was overheated rhetoric and an allegorical stretch even for politicians, and that counseling terminally ill patients who are in pain about their right to refuse “heroic” but probably ineffective measures to prolong life a while longer, is totally appropriate.  However, in order to pass the law, Congress compromised and dropped the end-of-life counseling provision.  Before the end of 2010, however, Medicare issued a regulation restoring the provision.  Moreover the regulation was buried among hundreds of other Medicare regulations.  The original Congressional supporter of government payments for such counseling was so delighted by this action that he urged his supporters “not to crow about it” presumably so it wouldn’t get much attention.  Can anyone believe this wasn’t the Administration’s intent all along?  As Charles Krauthammer stated in his December 31 op‑ed in the Washington Post, “For an Obama bureaucrat, … the will of Congress is a mere speed bump.”

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Written into the Declaration of Independence is a simple imperative, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Our nation was built on this concept, but the Obama administration is using its power to write regulation to circumvent the will of the people and advance its own agenda.

Three recent examples of this over reach are shocking and all Americans should demand an end to the practice and a reversal of what has already been done.  Citizens need to think, whether they agree with the reasons for the circumvention or not, about what is at stake.  Using regulation to specifically subjugate the will of the people to the agenda of any president is nothing less than tyranny.

The New York Times and Fox News, an unlikely combination, recently reported that the Obama Administration is taking advantage of a rule in the final version of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“Obamacare”) that authorizes Medicare coverage of yearly physical examinations.  The new rule says Medicare will cover voluntary advance care planning to discuss end-of-life treatment as part of an annual visit.  The mandate for end-of-life planning, commonly referred to as death panels, was specifically legislated out of Obamacare because of the uproar by the majority of Americans.  Most recent polls show 60% or more of the electorate wants Obamacare repealed, but this particular mandate was rejected by the people before the law was passed.

Using this embedded rule, one of the hundreds of Obamacare surprises that will be revealed over time, the Obama administration is able to achieve its policy goal through the regulation-writing process.  In this case, doctors will be encouraged to provide information on how to prepare an advance directive, stating how aggressively patients wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make health care decisions for themselves.  Regardless of the merits, this is not what the people want.  If this seemingly harmless step is allowed to be taken, what else can be written into regulations that will further circumvent the will of the people?

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From the Associated Press:

Stymied in Congress, the Obama administration is moving unilaterally to clamp down on power plant and oil refinery greenhouse emissions, announcing plans for developing new standards over the next year.

In a statement posted on the agency’s website late Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson said the aim was to better cope with pollution contributing to climate change.

“We are following through on our commitment to proceed in a measured and careful way to reduce GHG pollution that threatens the health and welfare of Americans,” Jackson said in a statement. She said emissions from power plants and oil refineries constitute about 40 percent of the greenhouse gas pollution in this country.

President Barack Obama had said two days after the midterm elections that he was disappointed Congress hadn’t acted on legislation achieving the same end, signaling that other options were under consideration.

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This week the EPA celebrates its 40th birthday. In honor of the occasion, they’ve launched a dedicated website called EPA@40, and it’s head, Lisa Jackson, will take off on a week-long party circuit designed to “highlight the impact of [the EPA's] efforts to clean up the air Americans breathe and the water they drink and the communities they live in” as well as her agency’s crusade to attend to “the unfinished business of the environmental movement.”

What started as a way to help the government respond to environmental disasters and spread conservation awareness, however, has metastasized into a bloated, over-reaching disaster of it’s own, championing extensive governmental intervention, curbing freedoms and, most recently, costing hard-working Americans their jobs, all in the name of preserving the environment.

In the midst of an economic downturn, the EPA will once again retool it’s famous, founding Clean Air Act, rewriting the historical legislation to suit Obama’s own bureaucratic needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, it’ll have a devastating effect on the private sector:

Achieving that level of reduction in greenhouse gases won’t be easy or cheap. This immense new burden on the private sector comes at precisely the wrong time for an economy still struggling to create new jobs and reduce near double-digit unemployment…The cost estimates are indeed staggering, according to an econometric study by the Manufacturers Alliance that projects more than 7.3 million lost jobs by 2020. The hardest-hit states include Texas, which would lose 1.7 million jobs, and Louisiana, with 938,000 positions lost. Others include California (846,000), Illinois (396,000) and Pennsylvania (351,000). Total losses would reduce the nation’s gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion, according to the Manufacturers Alliance.”

Of course, these new standards wouldn’t just affect isolated industries or particular states.

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Environmental Protection Agency officials Wednesday provided power companies and states with new guidance on EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gases.

A D.C. lobbyist for two major power companies told Bloomberg News that “the energy and manufacturing sectors will essentially be in a construction moratorium” as a consequence.

Here we are, with 15 million Americans unemployed and millions more underemployed, and the EPA is moving blindly ahead with new regulations that will increase dramatically the energy costs of U.S. industries, reducing their competitiveness and profitability, and making it less likely they will hire.

EPA’s action amounts to rewriting the Clean Air Act to suit its own bureaucratic and ideological objectives. At a time when the Obama administration should be focused on job creation and the nation’s economic recovery, promulgating stringent new environmental rules should be its last priority.

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Today E&E News reports (subscription required) green group faux-rage that industry reps were consulted on drafting an amendment by Sen. Lisa Murkowski to (IMO, rather unwisely) grant the Democrats a one-year reprieve from their looming political nightmare of EPA threatening to actually try and regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources by regulation under a Clean Air Act never designed for such foolishness.

Such unseemly whimpering is about as credible as the greens’ phony “hacked emails!” outrage, over what was from all appearances a whistleblower releasing “ClimateGate” email evidence of dirty green tricks. These are the same crowd whose slimy green tactics include stealing my trash on a weekly basis and working with, e.g., the Guardian to dishonestly cobble together unrelated, out-of-context (unlike ClimateGate) excerpts from emails to paint a false picture. (“Greens involved in journalism process!”; sadly, the Guardian never called me for their “story” about, well, me, so I must confess I wasn’t involved).

Specifically, E&E notes how:

“the Washington Post reported yesterday that [Bracewell & Giuliani's Jeff Holmstead] and another former EPA official, Roger Martella, ‘helped craft the original amendment Murkowski planned to offer on the floor last fall.’…

Environmentalists pounced on the reports as evidence that coal and oil interests are behind Murkowski’s efforts. ‘We now have proof that lobbyists for Big Oil, dirty coal and other special interests are directly involved in recent attempts to bail out big polluters and gut the Clean Air Act,’ said a Sierra Club press release. ‘What’s more, these big polluter lobbyists are the same former Bush administration officials who completely disregarded the Clean Air Act and even disobeyed the Supreme Court for years.’

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So, now that we’ve opened this can, just how sweeping is the “global warming” bills’ curiously identical Sec. 707?

At risk of getting into a peeing match which my time budget may not allow me to finish, I believe that the dispute between Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air and the folks at the WashingtonExaminer joining Sen. David Vitter (and, by implication, I suppose me) is not necessary but worth resolving. Caution: it is also for the legislatively inclined or otherwise the pointy-headed. But, since I arguably joined the fray here on Big Government on Tuesday, here goes.

At issue is a provision buried in both the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer “global warming” bills.

I had to leave for a few hours after starting my comment on this, in which time I decided not to wage the war over how strongly we need to argue that it prima facie nullifies the rest of the respective legislative language that too many lobbyists tout was carefully crafted to provide “certainty”. Lobbyists of course tend to say things reflecting well on their defense of client interests.

What is inescapable is that this language dispels such notions of certainty. But that shouldn’t be shocking. The bills statutorily establish “global warming” causation, for every existing or new increment of GHGs (read: employers, economic activity), as well as harm caused. And they fail to preempt states and elsewhere EPA as needed, or the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act or Endangered Species Act, or every other tool that’s already being tried out as a “global warming” law. Let alone the rest of the U.S. Code. All of which is relevant to context, as we shall see.

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