Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Is Obama Deliberately Sabotaging Democrat Senate Chances?

by JASmius

It sure looks that way, doesn't it?:

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday a plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30% by 2030 by imposing a new rule on the largest sources of greenhouse gasses in the country, power plants. The new rules are being issued by executive order by the president and encourages states to rely more on natural gas than coal for producing electricity.

First, the Economic Destruction Environmental Protection Agency is unconstitutional, because nothing in the Constitution enumerates the power even for its avowed mission to the federal government.  Second, even if the EPA were constitutional, Barack Obama cannot legally or constitutionally use it to make law under Article I, Section 1.  But in The Age Of The One, he has rendered the Constitution irrelevant to anything and everything he does.

And in this, as so many other instances, what he is doing is massively tyrannical and destructive:

"Anybody that depends upon coal for their electric power is going to see the utility bill skyrocket," Morris said. "With these new regulations, you're just going to see an explosion in those costs and the effect will be horrible for manufacturing."

The former adviser to former President Bill Clinton said that what Obama is doing in this move is "seizing control of another 17% of the American economy."

"The federal government spending is 35% — federal, state and local," Morris explained. "Then healthcare is another 17 [percent], manufacturing is 10 [percent], electric power generation and energy is seven [percent]."

"So he's now trying to control that entire range and that basically defines socialism, and don't think for a minute that global warming or health is what's motivating this. It's very simply a power grab by trying to regulate power plants," he contends.

An explosion in consumer and manufacturing costs almost six years into a deliberately Democrat-engineered economic depression, after the most recent GDP quarter showed "negative growth".  This is why we know that Barack Obama is not a Keynesian; because there is no way that a Keynesian economic acolyte would pursue contractionary policies at a time of economic downturn.  Thus, there is no economic or scientific justification for this latest illegal EPA crackdown.  It is....Barack Obama keeping his campaign promise from 2008 to cause electricity rates to "necessarily skyrocket".

We can't say we weren't warned.

But just as Barack Obama has grown the Executive Branch far beyond its constitutional boundaries, so the Judicial Branch is far more powerful than the Founders intended.  And it is still, barely and nominally, under constitutionalist control:

Barack Obama's move to enact new regulations on power plants through executive order is "a power grab" and will be "reversed by the Supreme Court," says political analyst Dick Morris.

"He couldn't get it through Congress, and he can't do it legally," Morris told J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV on Tuesday.

"This is going to be reversed by the Supreme Court," he added. "The Supreme Court has allowed [regulations] for cars under the Clean Air Act, but has not ruled on stationary pollution sources like smoke stacks, and I don't think it's going to affirm that."



So the power grab is doomed from the start - unless it's designed as a provocation to a constitutional showdown between the Executive and Judicial Branches in which the dictator plans to simply defy a SCOTUS ruling striking down his EPA power grab.  Given that I'm a member of the "Obama as revolutionary" school of thought as opposed to the "Obama is incompetent" camp, I don't see why he would bother with a move of this brazen magnitude if he didn't intend to make it stick, by any means necessary, thus neutering the courts as thoroughly as he has Congress.

Meanwhile, just as there is no economic or scientific justification, there is no political justification either, and plenty to the contrary:

Representative Ed Whitfield of Kentucky-1 told Newsmax TV on Monday that this move by Obama will likely hurt the election chances of Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is running against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Bluegrass State, where "about 94% of our electricity comes from coal."

Liberal columnist Rick Ungar also told Newsmax TV on Monday that he was shocked "that the president would choose to announce [the new EPA regulations] now, knowing Senate races in some very key districts like Kentucky, like Alaska" are taking place in November "where the coal industry is a very big employer."

Morris agrees that this will have a negative impact politically for Democrats running in those states and others.

"It virtually guarantees McConnell's victory, and, if there was any question, [Representative Shelley Moore] Caputo's victory in the Jay Rockefeller [Senate] seat in West Virginia," he added.

With so many issues turning decisively against the Democrats going into the November midterms, from the lousy economy to ObamaCare to all the Obama scandals crowned by VA-gate, the last thing congressional Donks need is for their demigod to pull something like this that confirms every negative voter suspicion and impression about their party.  And all for either nothing or a constitutional crisis without historical precedent.  And either way, it will seal their electoral doom, perhaps for years to come.

So: Is Barack Obama purposely guaranteeing the wipeout of his party's congressional wing?  Or is his EPA power grab and potential consolidation of all remaining federal power heretofore outside his grasp rendering congressional Democrats - and Republicans along with them - permanently irrelevant?  Or, put another way, has the Obama coup de tat and the formal end of American constitutional government that became inevitable on November 6th, 2012 already begun?

Wherever the truth lies, one thing of which we can be sure is that there'll be no soft landing for the rest of us.  And it will be but the beginning of the sorrows yet to come.

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