Who needs Congress to help govern America? Not the Obama administration, it seems.
At the UN Climate Control conference in Copenhagen yesterday, Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson said that she wants to work with Congress to contain carbon emissions that her agency claims are “dangerous.”
“This is not an either/or moment. This is a both/and moment,” Jackson said.
Consider that the velvet glove covering the administration’s extremist fist — which had itself been revealed a day earlier in Washington.
An Obama staffer — speaking anonymously, of course — told Fox News: “If [Congress doesn’t] pass [emissions-control] legislation . . . the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. And it is not going to be able to regulate in a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way.”
Take that, democracy!
On the merits, the stakes hardly could be higher.
The administration moved earlier this year to aggregate unto itself the power to control carbon-dioxide emissions — an inescapable byproduct of commerce and industry in America, and the bugbear of enviro-extremists around the globe.
Now it’s threatening to use that power:
* First, as a club to force Congress to pass the administration’s so-called “cap-and-trade” emissions-control legislation.
* And, failing that, to do the job itself — but in a way that will do great violence to what remains of America’s market economy. That’s what “regulate in a command-and-control way” really means.
Think of it as bad-cop, worse-cop.
None of this is a surprise.
As we noted on this page two days ago, the EPA’s radical power grab “paved the way for the agency to order an economically crippling cap on emissions by power plants, factories, even motor vehicles — the very same cap that Congress has so far refused to OK.”
But Congress is quite right to proceed with caution.
Those Climategate e-mails strongly suggest that the science underlying the administration’s extravagant carbon-cap claims has been cooked.
And anyway, no other major nation is willing to sign on to the effort. Is America to sacrifice its economy while others do nothing?
Members of Congress — regardless of party — should be outraged by the Obama overreach.
Whatever happened to the separation of powers, anyway?
Republican and Democratic legislators need to slap down President Obama’s egregious theft of power — now.