Does Climate Bill Give Obama Emergency Powers?
ByIt depends who you ask.
Senator David Vitter (R-LA) seems to think so.
The Washington Examiner reports:
Both the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy approved earlier this year and the version just okayed by Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Democrats (Republicans boycotted the vote) contains an obscure but nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.
Here’s how: The bills require a federal declaration of a “climate emergency” if world greenhouse gas levels reach 450 parts per million. Guess what? The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months. The bill then requires the president to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions…to address shortfalls” in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions.
When [Senator David] Vitter asked EPA Administrator what would be done in such a situation, she refused to say. So it must be asked: Would the president be empowered to do things like nationalize whole sectors of industry, ban coal use, restrict private automobile use, or whatever else the “emergency” requires? …
So, do these bills give President Obama such sweeping powers? Maybe, or maybe no more power than he enjoys today. Ed Morrissey believes this argument shifts the focus from the real issues of the bill, which are bad enough.
So the big consequence is that in 2015, and every four years afterward, the executive branch will have to draft recommendations for legislative action on reducing greenhouse gases. The EPA could certainly operate outside of those parameters, which would give the President at that time a lot of power to dictate certain responses within the regulatory framework — but that power exists now, and is referenced by “existing statutory authority”, which would not mean new dictatorial powers over production. In fact, Obama has threatened to wield it on a few occasions if Congress fails to pass cap-and-trade.
That’s not to say that this bill isn’t dangerous, but it simply doesn’t do what Vitter claims. Nowhere in either bill does the term “climate emergency” appear, which Vitter claims is the lever through which the President will claim dictatorial powers. We need to focus on the real problems of the bill, chief among them that it will kill jobs to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, rather than generate false hysteria to answer false hysteria.
I’ll let you be the judge. As far as I’m concerned, the federal government has far too much power over our lives as it is. Any attempts to further expand that power should be fought tooth and nail.
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