EPA’s illegal MPG (The Michigan View 08.05.11)

Posted by hpayne on August 5, 2011

The Obama administration’s new 54.5 mpg fuel mileage mandate is regulatory over-reach, is at odds with the American consumer, is cost ineffective, threatens vehicle safety, and burdens an industry trying to emerge from recession.

And it is illegal.

In its zeal to fight global warming, Lisa Jackson’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has executed a breathtaking power grab by changing the Corporate Average Fuel Standards (CAFE) without congressional authorization. Drafted by Congress in 1975, CAFE authorized the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) to administer the law.

But President Obama has made a habit of making end-runs around the people’s representatives in his rush to transform America to a Green utopia. Congress re-authorized CAFE in 2007 (to 35 mpg by 2020), but then Obama stealthily granted EPA co-administrative authority with NHTSA in speeding up the 2020 standards (to 2015) upon taking office in 2009. Now with its 54.5 mpg diktat, EPA has discarded Congress altogether, pulling an arbitrary number out of thin air without any congressional oversight, and forced it down the throats of U.S. automakers.

Rushing adoption of the standard while two of the government-funded Detroit Three feel compelled to stay quiet (and assured that a compliant mainstream media watchdog won’t bark either), EPA’s power grab is a first step in solidifying the agency’s power over all economic activity in the country.

This action has enraged House Republicans who have just passed out of committee an amendment that would strip EPA of the funds to implement CAFE.

The charge has been led by Republicans John Carter of Texas and co-sponsor Steve Austria of Ohio. Carter’s state is not only home to Toyota’s new Tundra truck manufacturing facility, but one of every four of his constituents buy pickup trucks.

“There is no way that pickup trucks could stay on the market at prices affordable for average Americans under these kind of restrictions,” says Carter. “Washington bureaucrats are so out-of-touch with real life in America they can’t conceive of the personal and economic damage they would cause by effectively taking the American pickup off the road.”

Carter is also ex-Texas judge and knows a violation of the law when he sees one.

“The EPA is saying ‘we don’t care what the law says,'” Carter’s Communications Secretary John Stone tells The Michigan View.com. “We’re going to bypass congressional oversight,” is how Stone characterized the EPA’s attitude.

While Carter’s amendment does not ditch CAFE all together – despite its perverse history forcing automakers to produce cars customers don’t want – it “returns regulation of fuel economy to one federal regulator (NHTSA). Congress never authorized EPA to regulate fuel economy under the Clean Air Act, a law not designed for such a purpose,” reads the bill which also strips the states (that’s you, California) “from regulating fuel economy.”

The EPA justifies its power grab with a liberal interpretation of the Supreme Court’s controversial, 5-4 vote, 2007 ruling which gave the EPA authority to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. The EPA – with the Obama White House’s blessing – interprets the ruling as giving it authority to regulate the entire U.S. economy, says Stone.

“EPA is using the courts to bypass Congress,” he adds.

In its zeal to transform America, the Obama Administration sees Congress as a deliberative roadblock to its ambitious green agenda. Influential green columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times pines for the U.S. to be “China for a day” where its executive branch could accelerate green technology by simply decreeing it.

Obama’s CAFE power grab is one step towards that authoritarian dream.

 

 

Comments are closed.