When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was launched in 1970, its stated mission was to “conduct environmental research, provide assistance…[in] combating environmental pollution, and assist the Council on Environmental Quality in developing and recommending…new policies for environmental protection…to the President.” From these things, it’s clear that President Richard Nixon’s goal in creating the EPA was to put an agency in place that would fill a research and advisory role for both himself and future presidents. There was no indication that he intended an ideologically driven juggernaut that not only researched but actually took unto itself the power to mandate the most stringent of eco-centered, blatantly anti-capitalist environmental guidelines and regulations imaginable.
In fact, the EPA is so far from its original purposes that in just the past few years officials from that agency have addressed everything from regulating to livestock emissions (cow flatulence) to regulating America’s water supply to putting their own Cap and Trade regulations in place. The latter truly reveals just how much power the EPA has taken unto itself, insofar as members of that agency are trying to put Cap and Trade in place although the American people and the U.S. Senate have already rejected it on face value. (Cap and Trade would be a boon to the already burgeoned EPA in that it would not only allow them to write guidelines and flood manufacturers with new regulations, but it would also put them in the catbird seat as the ones who would enforce and oversee the implementation of the regulations they write.)
Fortunately, Republicans in the new Congress have seen the EPA’s latest power-grab for what it is and have offered two pieces of legislation to curtail the power of that mammoth agency. The bills, one of which was introduced by Senator John Barrasso (R-Wo) and the other by Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok) and Representative Fred Upton (R-Mi), bar the EPA “from using its regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.” In doing this, the bills literally roll back the clock by taking away powers the EPA has unilaterally given itself during the last 40 years (like the power to regulate CO2 emissions).
The only disappointing thing about what Barrasso, Inhofe, and Upton are doing is that they don’t go far enough. In other words, it’s not just time to rein in the EPA but to abolish it.
The EPA is a tyrant’s best friend, because it provides a completely unchecked avenue whereby a President like Obama can bypass both the House and Senate to have freedom-robbing pet projects like Cap and Trade instituted without giving the people any recourse. (Remember, it was in light of his planned Cap and Trade legislation that candidate Obama pledged to drive new coal-power plants into bankruptcy, thus making conventional energy prices soar as a means of pushing people toward green energy. Republicans like Barrasso, Inhofe, and Upton recognize that the EPA is more than willing to be the agency that makes Obama’s campaign pledge come true.)
Again, the problem with the Republican proposal is that it does not go far enough. We don’t just want to lighten the weight of big government on our backs, we want to remove big government from our backs completely.
Therefore, while we still have momentum gained from the November 2010 elections, let’s not just rein in the EPA but abolish it. And having abolished it, let’s put an agency in its place that fulfills the original purpose of the EPA minus the capability to snowball itself into some arbitrary body of unchecked, de facto lawmakers whose names never appear on a ballot.
There are a lot of good ideas out there for an EPA replacement, not the least of which comes from Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions. But the first step is to tell current EPA personnel to clean out their desks and pack it up, because the American people are sick and tired of being ruled by a bunch of hard left, eco-minded bureaucrats.