While the insatiable Obama White House “pen and phone” machine has been spewing costly and draconian regulatory edicts at a fast and furious pace since taking power six years ago, it seems that the Holiday season has featured an even larger than usual number of wild decrees. Late last month, for example, as Americans were occupied with Thanksgiving, the Obama administration emitted what has been widely decried as the most costly single regulation in American history.
The so-called “ozone rule,” which estimates suggest could cost as much as $270 billion per year and put millions of American jobs at risk under the guise of further regulating emissions of the natural gas, was formally put forward the day before Thanksgiving. Lawmakers decried the timing of the massive regulation, suggesting the scheme was released during the holidays so “stupid voters” — as ObamaCare’s architect infamously described the American people — would be distracted with other matters.
Another major regulation imposed by the Obama administration in recent weeks surrounds the so-called “coal ash” rule regulating waste produced by electricity generation. The new scheme, finalized shortly before Christmas, could cost over $20 billion. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), presumably the next chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, blasted the plot as “a continuation of the president’s war on fossil fuels.” Among other concerns, he said the new regulations would “make states and utility companies vulnerable to new regulatory costs and expensive litigation.”
Other costly regulations in the pipeline include the Obama EPA’s radical bid to severely curtail emissions of CO2. The natural gas, which makes up a fraction of one percent of all the “greenhouse” gases present naturally in the atmosphere, is exhaled by humans and is described by scientists as the “gas of life.” Still, the White House and the United Nations continue their outlandish campaign to demonize the essential molecule as “pollution,” even threating to shackle humanity to a draconian global CO2 regime under the guise of stopping “global warming.”
Next year, meanwhile, the Obama administration is plotting to unleash yet another deluge of federal regulations targeting everything from fracking to power plants. State governments, lawmakers, and citizens have been fighting back, but so far, the White House shows no signs of backing off or even slowing down the pace when it comes to devastating decrees to pummel the economy and the American taxpayer. More “climate” decrees are coming, too, with the White House even threatening to impose a UN carbon regime on America without obtaining Senate ratification.
Separately, as The New American reported this month, the Obama administration’s increasingly dangerous and anti-constitutional usurpations of power have been accelerating. Despite White House attempts to dupe the American people by claiming it has imposed fewer “executive orders” than previous presidents, the administration was recently exposed by USA Today concealing most of its unilateral decrees by calling them “presidential memoranda” instead of orders. Obama has issued more than any president in history, doing everything from purporting to change federal law to even attacking the American people’s God-given rights using illegitimate executive edicts.
With the sprawling regulatory leviathan growing perpetually more costly and oppressive, critics say the American people’s elected representatives and the courts must both take action. “Congress should examine how executive agencies are exceeding key authorities granted to them and both narrow the substantive grants that are most subject to abuse and improve administrative procedures on multi-billion dollar regulations,” wrote attorneys Todd Gaziano and Mark Miller with the pro-liberty Pacific Legal Foundation in a recent Forbes column about the need to regulate what constitutes a regulation. “Until then, the courts must police these two areas, particularly in the rulemaking context.”
While Republican lawmakers have become adept at loudly complaining about the administration’s non-stop executive power grabs and regulations on the campaign trail, so far, they have done virtually nothing to stop it. In fact, despite all of the promises to rein in the Obama administration’s “imperial” presidency if elected to Congress, victorious Republicans, who already dominated the House of Representatives, recently passed a massive spending bill fully funding virtually every decree the White House has spewed since coming to power through next September.
In other words, GOP lawmakers, sent to Washington by outraged voters in November to stop Obama, gave up their most powerful tool to restrain the administration for almost a full year — before the new members could be seated, and for no good reason. The solution to the growing regulatory lawlessness, though, remains simple: Congress can and should defund the decrees and the unconstitutional agencies behind them before Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America is complete. The complete article is here.
