The Senate: Where the Energy Tax and ObamaCare Go to Die
Posted by Bill Dupray
on Jun 29 2009 Filed under Politics.
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The Sunday shows gave us a pretty good glimpse of how much trouble Obama’s big-ticket Socialist agenda is in. Though the Democrats are flush from their bloody House victory on Knee-Cap and Trade, Republican Senators wasted no time in trashing its prospects in the Senate.
As the warm-up act on on Friday, Sen. Jim Inhofe all but guaranteed the Energy tax would never make it through the Senate. On Sunday, the rest of the team piled on.
From Roll Call.
Leading Republican Senators on Sunday blasted the climate change package that cleared the House late last week and suggested it stands little chance of success in their chamber.
“This bill coming out of the House is going nowhere in the Senate,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” . . .
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” called the measure a jobs killer and argued it would lead to electricity rate hikes.
“If we do have a global warming problem, and many people believe we do, we need to target it on a global basis,” he said, suggesting the need to address foreign polluters like China and India.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said the House package would cost jobs and made the case for an international approach.
“We’ve got to have an international agreement so we have a level playing field,” he said in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”
Note the coordinated message by McConnell and Grassley. To hog-tie American businesses with a huge energy tax to control carbon emissions while China and India continue to chug along and “pollute” till the cows come home not only seems competitively damaging, but highlights the silliness of one country’s attempt to change the temperature of a planet, while two of the world’s largest “polluters” keep “polluting.” This is aside from the sheer lunacy of passing a Global Warming bill while the Earth is actually cooling.
The GOP can have its cake and eat it too with the “level playing field argument.” Normal Americans, and even some of the Global Warmers, will see the wisdom of not shooting ourselves in the foot at the start of this game. The argument serves to kick the issue down the road, make Obama use that magic talker of his to persuade China and India to sign on to an international deal (which won’t happen), and by the time the negotiations break down, the hoax will be fully exposed and the Global Warming hysteria will go the way of the Ice Age hysteria of the 1970′s.
David Axelrod all but acknowledges that Energy Tax will likely flame-out in the Senate.
The measure faces a steep climb in the Senate, and White House senior adviser David Axelrod, also on “This Week,” said it likely will not be dealt with until the fall.
Obama’s Nationalized Health Care is also in bi-partisan trouble in the Senate. Not only is Obama very likely going to adopt McCain’s policy of taxing employee health insurance benefits (a plan Obama vehemently opposed in the campaign – check the ad here), which would be a tax increase (along with the Energy Tax) on every American, but the Senate seems poised to reject the Socialist core of Obama’s plan; the “Public Option.”
Republican Senators said the government-backed option the White House is pushing as a centerpiece of the plan is a nonstarter in the Senate, with McConnell pointing to “a lot of Democrats who are uncomfortable” with the approach. Grassley said lawmakers should scrap the idea and instead pursue a plan to develop health care co-ops, an approach being pushed by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). Grassley said that idea could gather bipartisan support.
When Senators from both parties don’t like the idea of Nationalized Health Care, never mind raising taxes to pay for it, maybe the Senate will save us all from Barack Obama after all.
UPDATE:
Obama has now come out against trade sanctions against countries who do not accept limits on global warming “pollution.” This ensures that the GOP requirement of a level playing field will resonate with voters, including a lot of Rust Belt Democrats, who only voted for the bill in the House because such sanctions were included.
The House bill contains a provision, inserted in the middle of the night before the vote Friday, that requires the president, starting in 2020, to impose a “border adjustment” — or tariff — on certain goods from countries that do not act to limit their global warming emissions. The president can waive the tariffs only if he receives explicit permission from Congress.
The provision was added to secure the votes of Rust Belt lawmakers who were wavering on the bill because of fears of job losses in heavy industry.
In the floor debate on the bill Friday, one of its authors, Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said, “As we act, we can and must ensure that the U.S. energy-intensive industries are not placed at a competitive disadvantage by nations that have not made a similar commitment to reduce greenhouse gases.”In the interview on Sunday, Mr. Obama said American industries like steel, aluminum, paper and glass had legitimate concerns about competition from developing nations. But he warned that trade sanctions based on the extent to which other countries curbed carbon dioxide emissions might be illegal and counterproductive.
Love that last line. Obama is okay with a “counterproductive” tax on American companies, but not on their foreign competitors. Whose side is this guy on anyway?
Related Posts
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- Fargin War! Grassley now using opposition to ObamaCare as campaign pitch
- Politico – Senate Dems to W.H.: Drop cap-and-trade
Short URL: http://libertypundits.net/?p=4808
Duh!
Why aren’t more people, particularly state lawmakers and the federal Senate, pointing out, that given the federal Constitution’s silence about things like climate change and public healthcare, the federal government doesn’t have the constitutional authority to regulate and lay taxes for such things anyway? The 10th A. automatically reserves such powers to the states. In fact, Chief Justice Marshall had established the following case precedent, now wrongly ignored, which appropriately limits the power of the feds to lay taxes.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” –Chief Justice Marshall, GIBBONS V. OGDEN (1824) http://supreme.justia.com/us/22/1/case.html
I actually thank God for Obama for the following reason. The federal government has been wrongly usurping state powers, and laying constitutionally unauthorized taxes, at least since the 1930s when constitutionally clueless FDR established his constitutionally unauthorized federal spending programs. Hopefully misguided Obama is the flu germ which, having been injected into Uncle Sam’s arm, will trigger the “immune system” of the sovereign states to destroy the phony powers long associated with the Oval Office and Congress.
Your point is heartfelt. Part of the issue we have is the Article 1, Section 8. “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States …”
That “general welfare” clause has been applied broadly. Yes, too broadly.
Yes, the corrupt USSC perverted the general welfare clause with an unreasonably wide interpretation of it in order give the green light to FDR’s constitutionally unauthorized federal spending programs. But the USSC was not the only culprit where illegal federal spending is concerned, in my opinion. Please consider the following.
Note that the Founders originally established the federal Senate to give the state governments a distinct voice / vote in the federal government. This is evidenced by Article I, Section 3, Clause 1.
“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.”
However, before 1913, it seems that state sovereignty-ignorant voters were electing people to their state governments who were arguably as ignorant of 10th A. protected state powers as the voters were. This is evidenced by the fact that the state lawmakers unthinkingly ratified the ill-conceived, anti-state sovereignty 16th and 17th Amendments at the request of the corrupt, power-hungry Congress in 1913, essentially giving up control of the federal Senate, their only voice in the federal government. And its no surprise that the voters seemingly started using their new 17th A. powers to fill federal Senate seats with lawmakers who were as clueless about state sovereignty as the lawmakers that the voters had been electing to the state governments were.
So by the time that constitutionally clueless, big-shot spender FDR showed up on the scene in the 1930s, there was evidently not enough state sovereignty-savvy leaders left in the federal Senate to stop FDR from usurping state powers when he established his illegal New Deal spending programs.
Ignorance begs tyranny.