The Administration's Administrative Tyranny Marches On

This administration is abusive enough when it acts outside its constitutional authority, but it is even more tyrannical when it affirmatively thwarts the express will of the Congress on matters within the legislative domain.

When Congress denied Obama authority to transfer money to the International Monetary Fund, he did so anyway, issuing an executive order promising to give that body $140 billion for redistribution to Third World countries.

Now he's made another mockery of bipartisanship and the Constitution in making six recess appointments, including two people so objectionable that a near supermajority of Democratic senators wouldn't confirm them: James Cole as deputy attorney general, whose lax position in the war on terror is disturbing, and Francis J. Ricciardone Jr. as ambassador to Turkey.

Meanwhile, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is gearing up to engage in a defiant end run around Congress by attempting to impose cap-and-trade-type regulations by administrative fiat after Obama's failed attempt to shove this nightmarish disaster through Congress.

It obviously doesn't matter to these zealots that an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress couldn't pass cap and trade or that the Clean Air Act gives them no authority to regulate so-called greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn't matter that their proposed regulatory blitzkrieg would further damage an already anemic and precarious economy.

What matters is that the earth goddess Gaia beckons, and she is not to be denied. Just as her global warming cultists view every environmental development and incident as confirmation of their cataclysmic myopia, including the ones that flatly contradict their theories, her disciples in government march to her orders, irrespective of the rule of law and silly capitalistic concerns.

Unlike those annoying evangelical Christians, who employ gentle persuasion techniques in their efforts to proselytize, Gaia's acolytes use the coercive power of government to bring us all into the fold. And all this time, libs have been telling us they abhor state-sponsored religion.

So on Jan. 2, new and modified industrial facilities, such as refineries and power plants, will be required to incorporate processes designed to curb their carbon dioxide emissions. Initially, the regulations will apply only to those concerns that already fall under the EPA's rules governing the emissions of other pollutants, such as soot and smog.

But in July, the scope of the regulations will expand to encompass large plants based solely on their greenhouse gas emissions.

These developments also represent another phase of Obama's federal war against the states, which is currently raging in the Obamacare and Immigration Law theaters. That's because many states have conflicting or no administrative regulations in place to facilitate the implementation of the EPA's scheme.

Texas, for example, has adamantly refused to roll over for the administration's climate commands, so the EPA is preparing to subsume greenhouse gas permitting authority indefinitely in that little obstreperous state.

Even some Democrats and hardly conservative Republicans are objecting to this power grabbish assault on the economy. Sen. John Rockefeller warned of dire economic consequences and said, "We must call a timeout on these regulations." Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the EPA's new rules could lead to an "economic train wreck" and could cause businesses to close down, unemployment to rise and the costs of housing and consumer goods to increase.

And let's not forget gas prices. Remember when liberals used to oppose rising gas prices — you know, under Bush, even when they were still less than $2 per gallon? According to Sen. Barbara Boxer, those astronomical prices were the result of George Bush and Dick Cheney's being "too cozy with the oil industry."

The Heritage Foundation notes that gas prices decreased 9 percent during Dubya's eight-year tenure, but they've been on a steady rise under Obama. The EPA emission rules will clearly make it more expensive to convert fossil fuels into energy, putting even more upward pressure on gas prices.

That's not all. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has decreed that the Bureau of Land Management will establish new rules to make it more difficult to develop natural resources on government-owned land, which will also drive up the cost of gas and electricity and increase our dependency on foreign energy sources. All these developments serve as a nice complement to Obama's seven-year ban on drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. King Barack wasn't about to let the insubordinate courts have the last say in ruling that his earlier moratorium on deep- and shallow-water drilling was illegal.

In November, Obama's political theology took a shellacking at the polls, but he marches on, undeterred, in his quest to implement an agenda that is anathema to the great majority of Americans and devastating to our Constitution, our economic prosperity and our individual liberties.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His new book, "Crimes Against Liberty," was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for its first two weeks. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his website at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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