There is an election in this country tomorrow, right? And whoever wins is supposed to be in charge of the Executive Branch of government, right?
While these questions seem obvious on their face, reading this is enough to make many people wonder who really runs things, and whether the president in fact has power the Constitution supposedly gives him.
President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has devoted an unprecedented number of bureaucrats to finalizing new anti-coal regulations that are set to be released at the end of November, according to a source inside the EPA.
More than 50 EPA staff are now crashing to finish greenhouse gas emission standards that would essentially ban all construction of new coal-fired power plants. Never before have so many EPA resources been devoted to a single regulation. The independent and non-partisan Manhattan Institute estimates that the EPA’s greenhouse gas coal regulation will cost the U.S. economy $700 billion.
The rush is a major sign of panic by environmentalists inside the Obama administration. If Obama wins, the EPA would have another four full years to implement their anti-fossil fuel agenda. But if Romney wins, regulators will have a very narrow window to enact a select few costly regulations that would then be very hard for a President Romney to undo.
The polls being as close as they are, I can certainly understand the panic. And it is natural to expect a lame-duck administration to want to push through important items on their agenda at the last minute. That Barack Obama and his ilk are anti-energy is no surprise.
But to see such clear evidence that an agency like the EPA has more power than a duly elected president who is charged with running it is the sort of thing that engenders cynicism among ordinary people, many of whom conclude that voting makes no difference. Which is wrong, because it does make a huge difference. Romney is being relentlessly attacked, simply for wanting to slow down the EPA greenie weenie juggernaut.
It might not be as much of a choice as I would like, but there is a choice.
Speed up the environmentalists’ war on energy production, or slow it down?
Comments
6 responses to “Whoever is elected will be in charge. Well, sort of…”
Would it really be hard for Romney to undo or just politically expensive?
I hope Romney’s first act would be to fire every EPA drone involved in this BS.
Or end it, perhaps?
The dirty little secret is that Asia is burning every single lump of coal they can dig or buy. They will be doing so for a good 200 years.
Some countries have no enviromental standards. I was in Incheon last year, and it smelled like the Steubenville of my boyhood.
China, on the other hand, does a great job on sulfate emissions, but not so great on perticulates. We were at Shaolin Temple, and those misty mountains were extra-misty.
I don’t think it’s impossible for the president to overturn a rule like that, the question is how many civil-service pensions he has to destroy in order to do it. If he wades through the EPA like Genghis Khan, the media will scream the whole time. In previous administrations, that was enough to make it difficult.
I wonder, though, if the screams of the media and the civil service still reach enough ears to matter?
The way to clean house in all the departments of the Obama infestation is a simple reorganization. It is how Bush and congress neutered the CIA following the Plame affair. Slip an amendment into the next EPA authorization that directs the new administrator to reorganize, and they can redraw all the lines. Same legislation can roll back all Obama era rules / regulations. Alternately, the new Administrator can withdraw from all the consent agreements reached over the last 10 – 30 years and force the greens to go to court. They have done a lot of legislating via consent agreements between greens inside the EPA and greens outside. Congress will have to be involved. Cheers –
It’s NOT the President. It’s the House and Senate that can stop this nonsense. VOTE, baby vote…locally. The President is seriously crippled without the legislators. Get our guys in.
Presidentially, we have the choice of socialism or socialism-lite. Get the HOUSE AND SENATE. They are there to smack down the White House (and the Judiciary, if needed).. we have a triangular gov’t for a reason.
Though… the President COULD help by rescinding multiple “Executive Orders”