When it comes to climate change legislation, it’s hard to figure what the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer could possibly be thinking.
Less than 48 hours after citizens in New Jersey and Virginia turned around the last year’s support of President Obama and his policies by a whopping 25 percent, Boxer rammed a cap-and-tax bill through her committee that is even worse than the one passed by the House last June. That House bill provoked the first angry “town hall” meetings — everyone remembers them as being about health care, but they really started in response to climate legislation — that culminated in Tuesday’s landslides.
How can Boxer not realize that forcing this bill out of committee is an even bigger slap against taxpayers and energy consumers?
If anything, she has guaranteed the measure’s failure on the Senate floor, where any chance that there will be 60 votes required to close debate has just evaporated. By doing this, she has taken the regulation of carbon dioxide away from the people’s representatives and placed it in the hands of the unelected Environmental Protection Agency, which will be given its marching orders by climate czar Carol Browner.
This will only incite more anger that government by the people is rapidly becoming government by czars.