Protest notes provide direction to challenge usurpation

Louisiana officials have joined in calling for the Environmental Protection Agency from backing off its ideologically-driven choice to set the stage for its regulation of carbon emissions as an “endangerment.” How they are doing so may point to a strategy for defeating the power grab.

As noted previously, a twisted interpretation of a law never intended to apply to what is in fact a nonexistent problem is going to allow the EPA eventually to issue regulations that will have a profound negative impact on the American economy – an issue pointed out in these numerous communiqués. But most galling is that the EPA in the process plans to rewrite unilaterally the law without Congressional approval. To understand why, we must first acknowledge the political nature of the “man-made global warming” issue and the political and monetary agendas of those who support it.

The hoax largely is aided and abetted because of a mixture of ideology and money. Pres. Barack Obama and many liberal Democrats want to use the issue to acquire more power and privilege for government they think they will control. The federal and other governments dole out huge sums of money to researchers to give them incentives to fashion research that will support this agenda (the exposure of these efforts now turning them into babbling, transparent apologists). Interest groups who share this ideology shut their eyes to the lack of and contradictory evidence to their article of faith (much of the recent research now having been found manipulated to attempt to validate their faith) in order to continue to maintain their purposes and jobs. Genuine scientific inquiry is a casualty of those that assert human activity makes any significant contribution to climate change.

Yet none of this is argued by the correspondents even as in replies to them the article of faith is reasserted. And all Louisiana legally can do is protest; it has no legislative power to make any changes to this federal concern. However, that the approach is to highlight the impact on property rights and economic freedoms may point to how to overcome the unilateral action of the executive branch, taken because Obama cannot get a reluctant Congress to put into law this policy.

What the EPA does not want to admit (and which is why it continues to claim it is being “compelled” to act in this way by a Supreme Court decision) is that it intends to act extralegally. The very law it cites as forcing it states that endangerment means regulation essentially of any property with a significant structure on it the size or more of an acre. Unilaterally, the EPA is creating a “tailoring rule” that will increase by an order of two magnitudes the emissions standard by which a property would face regulation because it knows to follow the law as written would subject well over a million new structures to a complicated regulatory process that would be overwhelmingly politically unpopular and enormously expensive.

The approach that these opponents of the EPA’s usurpation of legislative power appears to focus on a court challenge that initially would make the EPA follow the letter of the law, and once that happens, to sue on the basis that the interpretation of the Clean Air Act of 1971 constitutes impermissible takings under the Constitution. If this is what Gov. Bobby Jindal and others are intending by penning these protests, rather than a futile attempt at persuasion these lay the groundwork for policy that reasserts proper Constitutional authority. As such, they do Louisianans a service.