EPA Rules Will Trump Your Rights

Ignoring both Congress and the voters, the Environmental Protection Agency starts the new year governing by decree with job-killing regulations. Take a deep breath, but if you exhale you're a polluter. Cap-and-trade is dead, long live cap-and-trade in the form of regulations promulgated in the coming year by what George Orwell might call the Ministry of Environment. It claims that the Clean Air Act and a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 let the EPA regulate carbon dioxide as a planet-warming pollutant. We recently commented on the EPA's recent commandeering of the permitting process from Texas, with which it is in a legal tussle over federalism, states' rights and the Constitution's enumeration of powers and who may exercise them. The federal agency also plans to issue greenhouse gas permits in seven other states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Oregon and Wyoming. So now just as rationing and death panels return under regulations written "as the secretary shall determine," a phrase rapidly replacing "we the people" under this administration, the EPA plans to propose so-called performance standards for oil- and coal-fired power plants in July 2011 and for refineries in December 2022...more