Senate to vote Thursday on massive EPA power grab that would empower the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant

On Thursday, the Senate will vote on S.J.Res.26, a resolution to block EPA from usurping powers never delegated to it by Congress. Failure means allowing EPA to go forward, apparently in flagrant violation of our constitutional traditions simply because too many in Congress desire, but can’t bear to take responsibility for, more of the Obama agenda.

EPA’s breathtaking Power Grab raises questions critical to our form of governance. The powers EPA has claimed for itself include staking out national policy on the contentious “climate” issue, and even amending the Clean Air Act on its own initiative and authority.

S.J.Res. 26 was originated by Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). It is co-sponsored by 40 others, mostly Republicans but including three Democrats (the math of which also tells you that three Republicans are not on board: Sens. Brown, Collins and Snowe). It seeks to exercise, for just the second time, the Congressional Review Act passed in 1996 as part of the “Contract with America”. That law allows legislators to check bureaucrats gone wild by vetoing a “major rule” within 60 days of an agency publishing it.

In this case, the rule is the Obama EPA’s effort to delegate to itself inherently legislative powers. These include Congress’s authority—wisely eschewed to date—to regulate carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act, which would make EPA an economic regulatory agency despite having been caught as complicit in promoting scandalous “climate science” in the push to spectacularly expand its budget and powers.

You may recall “ClimateGate” from last year and the series of “-gates” befalling the UN’s big-government project, the IPCC. EPA outsourced its scientific assessment responsibilities in this matter, to principally rely instead on the work of the two disgraced bodies caught sexing up their claims of unfolding climate catastrophe. When caught out, EPA silenced their internal whistleblower.

The Senate is not voting on science, however. The Murkowski resolution merely overturns the legal force and effect of EPA’s claim that carbon dioxide endangers human health and the environment (really). Congress has serially rejected that proposition. Now EPA is saying “so what?” This poses a referendum not on climate science but the constitutional propriety of EPA making climate policy without Congress providing any specific guidance to do so.

That is, the Senate will vote whether to let an agency carry out the most expansive regulatory intervention in American history on its own.