Obama's EPA wants to play hardball with Congress on climate change

Russ Steele

Consider this from Hot Air:

After initially appearing to retreat in the face of the midterm onslaught, Barack Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson have decided to pursue an end-run strategy to impose regulation on energy producers regarding greenhouse-gas emissions.  The move sets up a confrontation between the White House and Congress, which has already signaled a willingness to play hardball with Obama on regulatory innovation.

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The incoming Congress has many tools to block or slow the regulatory growth, one of which Harry Reid handed to Republicans this week.  The GOP will have the ability to shape funding for the EPA for the final six months of this fiscal year.  Congress can either mandate that no funds be spent from EPA’s budget for the purpose of creating or enforcing greenhouse-gas emissions, or they can defund the agency entirely after March 4th.  The latter will almost certainly set up a government-shutdown confrontation, but the former probably wouldn’t, especially since a few red-state Senators would likely join the Republicans in reining in Jackson.  Jay Rockefeller already proposed a two-year moratorium on EPA regulatory expansion to prevent just this scenario.

I do not think this action is going to work out well for the EPA.  Money is the mothers milk of politics, the EPA is about to get their funding cut!  Rep. Darrell Issa, the Ranking Member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, released a report Wednesaday entitled:  “A Constitutional Obligation:  Congressional Oversight of the Executive Branch detailing how “the vast expansion of the power and reach of the Executive Branch of government under both Republican and Democratic administrations has only increased the need for vigorous, unflinching Congressional oversight.”

One of the issues in the report was the Politicization of Science. The Republican Minority had requested that the Democratic Majority Chairman launch a full Committee investigation into the "Climategate" emails and EPA’s lack of transparency and alleged misconduct, but the Minority did not received a response from the Majority.

Based on his report, we can expect the new Majority Chariman Issa will be looking into “Climategate,” and the large volume of email messages and documents from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia that raised some serious questions about the research that leading to the findings released by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).   These IPCC reports were used by the EPA to determination that carbon dioxide (CO2) endangers human health and welfare, and the EPA may have inappropriately limited staff contributions, suppressed dissent, and may have punished those who challenged the Obama Administration’s environmental agenda.  This is going to be an interesting two years, stay tuned.