Presidential Emergency Powers in Cap and Trade Bills

Both the Waxman-Markey House of Socialist Representatives carbon cap and trade bill and the Boxer Senate Environment and Public Works Committee carbon cap and trade bill have a common provision to give the President strongman emergency powers.  These powers kick in automatically when all greenhouse gases other than water vapor reach an equivalent CO2 atmospheric concentration of 450 ppm.  CO2 is presently 399 ppm, but other greenhouse gases are much more potent, such as methane and N2O.  They therefore count as large multiples of their ppm concentrations in equivalent CO2 concentrations.  The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory says that the 450 ppm CO2 equivalent will be reached in a few months.

The emergency power provision requires the President to use all statutory powers of federal agencies to reduce the greenhouse gas concentrations.  Given that the EPA is about to gain the power to make draconian cuts in these so-called pollutants under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts by reinterpreting them as invited to do by the courts, the strongman Presidential emergency power will be huge.  Obama will be able to give Hugo Chavez a dance for complete and arbitrary power as he decrees which friends of socialism get to continue using power and which have to stop dead in their tracks.  Obama will have the power to shut down industries and stop traffic.  This power will give him total control of the private sector.

The ensuing unrest may be great.  It is for this reason that he wanted a paramilitary service organization of fanatical young Americans straight out of the Socialist Production Factories, our colleges and universities.  Remember, he wants them to be as well-funded as the military is now.  He will have to operate quickly to set them up, but then quick usurpation of power is his and Pelosi's specialty.

There are heavy consequences to be paid for Americans refusal to take the Constitution seriously.  We have lost the principle that that government is good and legitimate only to the degree that it preserves, defends, and protects the sovereign right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The only way to keep government from usurping power is for the American People to strongly and tirelessly insist that their government operate constitutionally.  We have failed to do that and we have never failed so badly as we did in the 2008 elections, with the possible exception of the 1932 elections.