Obama Pledges More Costly Emissions Targets, Again Trying To Bypass Congress
President Obama appears confused that he cannot be like other country leaders & "dictate to the USA. |
Today in Washington, D.C. - Nov. 12, 2014 - Congress returned today for Congressional "Lame Duck" session. Many Senators and Representatives, most of them Democrats, will not be returning in January 2015.
The U.S. House will reconvene at 2 PM today. The are expected to address a couple administrative property transfers and may take up us a couple issues but no votes on significant legislation is expected today unless enough House members return by this afternoon.
The U.S. Senate will reconvene at 2 PM today. At 5:30 PM, the Senate will vote on cloture on the nominations of Randolph Moss, to be District Judge for the District of Columbia and Leigh Martin May to be District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia. Since the Democrat leadership has been using the nuclear option to advance President Obama's judicial appointments, expect if enough Senators are present these nominations will be advanced. If cloture is invoked on either nomination, a confirmation vote will be held on Thursday.
Politico reports today, “President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly pledged Wednesday to slash or limit carbon emissions over the next two decades in a bid by the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas polluters to kick-start global talks to combat climate change. . . . Obama said the U.S. would cut its emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, accelerating the pace of reductions already planned through 2020. . . . [One administration] official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the administration does not believe resistance from Capitol Hill can derail the president’s drive to shift U.S. energy consumption away from fossil fuels.”
That sort of dismissal of Congress’s role certainly fits with the pattern of the Obama White House’s continuing attempts to bypass Congress on everything from Obamacare implementation to education, campaign finance rules, domestic emissions regulations, immigration, prosecuting terrorists, regulating the Internet, and now an emissions agreement with China.
A Politico story last night suggested this is just the beginning of a “coming climate onslaught” from the administration: “The Obama administration is set to roll out a series of climate and pollution measures that rivals any president’s environmental actions of the past quarter-century . . . . Tied to court-ordered deadlines, legal mandates and international climate talks, the efforts scheduled for the next two months show that President Barack Obama is prepared to spend the remainder of his term unleashing sweeping executive actions to combat global warming. . . .
“The coming rollout includes a Dec. 1 proposal by EPA to tighten limits on smog-causing ozone, which business groups say could be the costliest federal regulation of all time; a final rule Dec. 19 for clamping down on disposal of power plants’ toxic coal ash; the Jan. 1 start date for a long-debated rule prohibiting states from polluting the air of their downwind neighbors; and a Jan. 8 deadline for issuing a final rule restricting greenhouse gas emissions from future power plants. That last rule is a centerpiece of Obama’s most ambitious environmental effort, the big plan for combating climate change that he announced at Georgetown University in June 2013.
“Obama announced yet another initiative Wednesday in Beijing, where he and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly committed to targets for the two nations to curb their carbon emissions during the next two decades. And on top of all that, the administration is expected in the coming weeks to pledge millions of dollars — and possibly billions — to help poor countries deal with the effects of climate change.”
AFP reported, though, that “The US Senate's Republican leader slammed President Barack Obama's proposed greenhouse gas reductions as an ‘unrealistic plan.’ ‘This unrealistic plan, that the President would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs,’ Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said of Obama's proposals announced in Beijing.”
Leader McConnell also said, “Our economy can’t take the President’s ideological War on Coal that will increase the squeeze on middle-class families and struggling miners. . . . The President said his policies were on the ballot, and the American people spoke up against them. It’s time for more listening, and less job-destroying red tape. Easing the burden already created by EPA regulations will continue to be a priority for me in the new Congress.”
With the country still experiencing an uncertain economy, the last thing Americans need are costly regulations that will prevent job creation and drive up families’ energy bills.
The Hill, businesses are already “bracing for an onslaught of regulations, with the Obama administration bent on completing a host of the president’s unfinished policy goals and the midterm elections now in the rearview mirror. Agencies across federal government are expected to drop a host of major rules over the next few months, with regulations running the gamut from calorie label requirements on restaurant menus to new rules for hydraulic fracturing and air pollution. There are roughly two dozen major rules that are scheduled to drop between now and late January, according to a review of the administration’s official regulatory agenda and rules now awaiting approval at the White House. Groups including the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute said they are most concerned by expected costs associated with a slate of rules now in the pipeline at the Environmental Protection Agency.”
The Hill also notes, “Critics from both the left and the right suggest the White House might have timed some of these rules to drop after the midterm elections because of election-year politics.‘It’s not surprising that the Obama administration would hold back some of these big regulations for political reasons,’ said Sam Batkins, regulatory director at the conservative American Action Forum. ‘There’s more than one instance of this happening over the past few years.’ . . .
“Ahead of the 2012 presidential election, critics accused Obama of twisting then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s arm into dropping a controversial ozone rule that would have established stronger air quality standards but could have also been a drag on his reelection campaign. This time around, with Senate Democrats in the hot seat, the administration elected to hold off on issuing the rule until after the election, despite a pressing Dec. 1 court-ordered deadline.”
In a press conference last week, Leader McConnell expressed Republicans’ frustration over the president’s ongoing determination to try to sideline Congress in many significant areas. “[I]t's like waving a red flag in front of a bull to say, if you guys don't do what I want, I'm going to do it on my own. And the president's done that on Obamacare. He's done it on immigration and threatened to do it again. I hope he won't do that because I do think it poisons the well . . . .”
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