Last Thursday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced a resolution of disapproval, under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to overturn EPA’s endangerment finding. Murkowski’s floor statement and a press release are available here.
As you’d expect, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and other apostles of Gorethodoxy were quick to condemn the resolution as an attack on the Clean Air Act, science, public health, and the children.
Rubbish!
At a press conference she organized on the same day the resolution was introduced, Boxer and others tried to spin the Murkowski resolution as a referendum on science – as if Congress, King Canute-fashion, could alter the results of scientific research.
A strong case can be made that the endangerment finding is scientifically-challenged. But that’s not what the Murkowski resolution is about.
As the Senator made clear in her floor statement, and as you can see from the text, the resolution is a referendum on the propriety of EPA taking control of the economy without so much as a by-your-leave from the people’s elected representatives. The Murkowski resolution vetoes the endangerment finding’s regulatory force and legal effect, not its intellectual content.
EPA’s endangerment finding, as I explain in this column on Pajamas Media, would launch an era of runaway regulation without representation. The Murkowski resolution is a gutsy action to safeguard the economy, government’s accountability to the people, and the separation of powers under the Constitution.
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{ 1 comment }
Point well taken. Problably the only option open since Speaker Pelosi would never let an effort to stop EPA from being considered on the House floor and Majority leader Reid, who procedurally controls the Senate floor, would insure that an amendment to bar funding for EPA to implement the Endangerment Resolution would never be allowed a clean vote as he did last Fall when Murkowski fiirst offered and on January 20 when he had reseerved the right to offer a side-by-side vote.
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