The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Clueless Constitutional Commenter Klein: Is That A Nose In Front Of Your Face?

Posted on | August 21, 2011 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

I crashed at the end of the first paragraph from Ezra Goober:

Over the next 18 months, the Environmental Protection Agency will finalize a flurry of new rules to curb pollution from coal-fired power plants. Mercury, smog, ozone, greenhouse gases, water intake, coal ash—it’s all getting regulated. And, not surprisingly, some lawmakers are grumbling.

I’ll give you one more ‘graph for context:

Industry groups such the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, and the American Legislative Exchange Council have dubbed the coming rules “EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck.” The regulations, they say, will cost utilities up to $129 billion and force them to retire one-fifth of coal capacity. Given that coal provides 45 percent of the country’s power, that means higher electric bills, more blackouts and fewer jobs. The doomsday scenario has alarmed Republicans in the House, who have been scrambling to block the measures. Environmental groups retort that the rules will bring sizeable public health benefits, and that industry groups have been exaggerating the costs of environmental regulations since they were first created.

So what is missing?

Recall Article 1 Section 1:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States

What’s not obvious is how Congress creates an EPA, and we’re left with ‘lawmakers are grumbling’. In a representative Democracy, those lawmakers should, well, make laws. If the people grumble, the lawmakers get voted out on their ear.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies. The over-arching question of our time is not how to prevent the Executive from hyper-extending itself. That joint has already been tortured beyond recognition. The question is how were going to re-set that Executive joint, and constrain it with public diligence to operating within its proper, Executive range of motion.

This blog calls for courageous candidates who will begin removing federal bureaucracies outright. Just send those fat-cat GS dudes packing. I’ve seen some of those slugs moving from meeting to meeting, lost in an acronym-driven PowerPoint daze. While the Left spews hate on corporations and their jets, bear in mind that the threat is the self-entitled homo bureaucratus slug, who will emerge from torpor quickly to address threats to funding.

Can’t figure out whether Klein just isn’t very bright, and misses the point, or is very bright, and paid to run interference for these creeps who threaten the health of the country.

Category: Ezra Klein, Uncategorized

Comments

15 Responses to “Clueless Constitutional Commenter Klein: Is That A Nose In Front Of Your Face?”

  1. ThePaganTemple
    August 21st, 2011 @ 12:23 pm

    It would be a fairly easy problem to solve if the Congress had the guts to do it. Simply stop funding the EPA. What’s wrong with these assholes anyway? Do they actually think the EPA is a popular government agency and de-funding it would cost them votes? Do they think the courts would step in and order them to fund it. Guess what? If any judge did that they could be arrested and tried for trying to overstep their constitutional authority. It would be tantamount to a coup on their part. Sometimes I think the Republicans, as a group, would rather keep things like the EPA around as a whipping boy, a boogie man.

  2. Ran
    August 21st, 2011 @ 1:14 pm

    “ While the Left spews hate on corporations and their jets, bear in mind that the threat is the self-entitled homo bureaucratus slug, who will emerge from torpor quickly to address threats to funding.”

    You and Tocqueville are on the same page. (…er, somewhere in Volume 2, ‘Democracy in America‘, ca 1830.)

    Cheers

  3. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 1:27 pm

    “Can’t figure out whether Klein just isn’t very bright, and misses the point, or is very bright, and paid to run interference for these creeps ”

    How about – isn’t very bright and paid to run interference for these creeps?  There’s also the “ignorance” factor.

  4. The Cob
    August 21st, 2011 @ 1:33 pm

    Rather than fearing government shutdowns, conservative leaders should be embracing them. Limiting government to essential functions (as delineated in the Constitution) is the quickest way to demonstrate how unnecessary and counterproductive most of these regulatory geniuses are. The trick is to make sure that soldiers and retirees are taken care of while the bureaucrats are on unpaid leave.

  5. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 1:50 pm

    Yeah, I’ll take both for a thousand, Smitty.

  6. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 2:06 pm

     That’s not hard, Cob. Simply make the budget for the things you want to fund in the form of very specifically crafted laws to, for example, pay the military. Call it The Troops Deserve Their Pay Act of 2012 and force these slugs into a stand-alone up or down vote. And every day, on any appearance, begin your statement, interview, etc. with “Today marks Day x that the Democrats don’t think the troops deserve their pay.”

    Lather, rinse, repeat until all the things the government should fund have their money. Then stop passing anything. Force O! and his crew to either shut it down or break the law by trying to transfer the money from the things you funded.

    Of course, that would require Boehner and crew to have 2 brain cells and two functioning testicles….

  7. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 3:02 pm

    Shallow describes Ezra reasonably well.  In fact it’s a twofer.  Lacking depth of 1) intellect, and 2) knowledge.
     
    When he’s not sitting on it, our shallow Ezra keeps his belfry ensconced in his Personal Urban Self-contained  Liberal Inducing Cloistered Kiosk

  8. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 4:09 pm

    Correction, it’s actually a fellow drone from Sector 7G, the Obi Wan to
    Ezra’s Qui Gon Jinn, this was pointed out on another blog.

  9. DaveO
    August 21st, 2011 @ 5:56 pm

    How does one send fat-cat GS folks packing?

    Watch them inflate the number of position allocations, and when called to cut, perform the paper cut: X number of positions (unfilled) cut, plus natural attrition of Y number of retirees (had already put in for retirement) for Z% (whatever Congress mandates). Just watched the Army do this this past week. Generated ginormous savings. Just ask ’em!

    Klein, like Obama, is not a Constitutional scholar. Klein, like Obama, lies in the performance of his job. There’s no conscience involved. If he wasn’t lying in the paper, he’d be on Home Shopping Network hawking glass beads and absorbent scraps of cloth. Klein, like Obama, had no experience for the job he’s paid to do, and lacks the moral discipline to understand that people rely on him to tell the truth.

    Klein is Obama. They deserve each other.

  10. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 6:19 pm

    You would be amazed/appalled if you knew how many people believe the EPA is the only thing standing between us and utter environmental devastation. When I told my brother we should abolish the EPA his retort was if it weren’t for the EPA businesses would dump raw sewage in the rivers.

  11. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 6:31 pm

    Not to push Newt for president but at the end of this article from the DC is a video of one his better ideas.

    http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/17/epas-new-ozone-regulations-overburden-local-governments-say-critics/

  12. Adjoran
    August 21st, 2011 @ 7:15 pm

    It’s not that Klein is dumb.  It’s that he is evil, a totalitarian at heart.  Never forget the idea behind his Journ-O-List, to manage the news and how it is interpreted to the public to maintain a leftist, I mean “progressive” slant on events before the unaltered information gets out on its own.  IOW, pretty close to what Goebbels’ job was.

    Besides, he disregards the Constitution because, as he said on television, “it’s like 100 years old or something.”

    He much prefers the Obama method of rule by decree, fiat, and regulation without regard to statute.  Who needs the rule of law when you can make up your own along the way?

    The technical term for this system of governance is “dictatorship.”

  13. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 8:40 pm

    Thaaaaat’s right, Barack… Turn out the lights right before the election… *ssssssh* Nobody interrupt them.

  14. ThePaganTemple
    August 21st, 2011 @ 9:17 pm

    There’s some, a very few, that probably would if they thought they could get away with it. That’s what the courts are supposed to be for. Abolishing the EPA doesn’t necessarily mean it would be an open invitation to poison the environment just for grins. There could still be prosecutions and lawsuits, and just because of that such actions would be few and far between, if they happened at all.

    Moreover, having the EPA doesn’t really prevent it if the right businessman were to grease the right palms. But its not really going to happen a lot, if at all. Its all a bunch of bullshit, just a way to fill the ranks of government workers drawing government money to fill the coffers of government unions and the Democratic Party, and using government as a wedge to subsidize favored businesses (like those run by Warren Buffet and Jeffrey Imelt, for example) and cripple the others.

  15. Anonymous
    August 21st, 2011 @ 9:38 pm

    All of the above may be true, none the less most American believe that the EPA is what makes our air and water clean.