We are to the point in this Great Nation, where we need to have a debate on What the Constitution is… ie… a limited Government document as our Founders wanted? or a Document that gives unlimited Federal Power, as the Federal Government, through its own Courts, have interpreted it to be.

IMO, this is the next great debate, but NEITHER of the entrenched Political Parties want this debate, as they have BOTH been guilty of abusing the Constitution.

Romeo13 on November 10, 2009 at 1:38 PM

Wouldn’t this just give the opportunity to shove the Constitution aside? I say, no debate; rather, a firm reminder of its authority. Also, a reminder of how our government, i.e., checks and balances, should run.

I do enjoy reading your opinion. That of Horatius too.

Patriot Vet:

Don’t be misled by an unlikely threshold for the trigger in question. That number can be amended any time ex post facto in the blink of an eye. Happens all the time.

JM Hanes on November 10, 2009 at 6:12 PM

JM,

Thanks for the concern, but I am far from being misled by any person who believes AGW. I was merely pointing to the shoddy science that the purported “scientist” used in claiming that CO2 could reach 450 ppm in a few months. It always seems that they ignore reality, for some modeled world that suits them best.

You are correct in that they will most certainly lower their “target” so as to be able to implement their domination over our lives. That is all the more reason that this pile of manure, the Climate Bill, should be defeated.

If you examine the sweep of the “existing statutory authority” which the President “shall direct relevant Federal agencies to use” — in order to take the “appropriate actions” specified in its own reports — you might not be so sanguine about potential havoc, or so dismissive of Vitter’s objections.

Patriot Vet:

Don’t be misled by an unlikely threshold for the trigger in question. That number can be amended any time ex post facto in the blink of an eye. Happens all the time.

The fawning media and all the other usual suspects would take it seriously and run with it.

What is going on with this country? When did we go crazy?

UncleZeb on November 10, 2009 at 12:51 PM

1964

SEC. 705. REVIEW AND PROGRAM RECOMMENDATIONS.
`(f) Recommendations-

`(1) LATEST SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION- Based on the analysis described in subsection (a)(1), each report under subsection (a) shall identify actions that could be taken to–

`(A) improve the characterization of changes in the earth-climate system and impacts of global climate change;

`(B) better inform decision making and actions related to global climate change;

`(C) mitigate risks to natural and social systems; and

`(D) design policies to better account for climate risks.

`(2) MONITORING, REPORTING AND VERIFICATION- Based on the analysis described in subsection (a)(2), each report under subsection (a) shall identify key gaps in measurement, reporting, and verification capabilities and make recommendations to improve the accuracy and reliability of those capabilities.

…(C) possible strategies and approaches for achieving additional reductions.

`(g) Authorization of Appropriations- There are authorized to be appropriated to carry out this section such sums as may be necessary.

`SEC. 706. NATIONAL ACADEMY REVIEW.

`(a) In General- Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this title, the Administrator shall offer to enter into a contract with the National Academy of Sciences (in this section referred to as the `Academy’) under which the Academy shall, not later than July 1, 2014, and every 4 years thereafter, submit to Congress and the Administrator a report that includes–

…`(4) review and compare the emissions reduction potential, commercial viability, market penetration, investment trends, and deployment of the technologies described in paragraph (3), including–

`(A) the need for additional research and development, including publicly funded research and development;

`(B) the extent of commercial deployment, including, where appropriate, a comparison to the cost and level of deployment of conventional fossil fuel-fired energy technologies and devices; and

`(C) an evaluation of any substantial technological, legal, or market-based barriers to commercial deployment.

`(d) Recommendations-

`(1) LATEST SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION- Based on the review described in subsection (a)(1), the Academy shall identify actions that could be taken to–

`(A) improve the characterization of changes in the earth-climate system and impacts of global climate change;

`(B) better inform decision making and actions related to global climate change;

`(C) mitigate risks to natural and social systems;

`(D) design policies to better account for climate risks; and

`(E) improve the accuracy and reliability of capabilities to monitor, report, and verify greenhouse gas emissions reduction efforts.

`(2) TECHNOLOGICAL INFORMATION- Based on the analysis described in subsection (a)(2), the Academy shall identify–

`(A) additional emissions reductions that may be possible as a result of technologies described in the analysis;

`(B) barriers to the deployment of such technologies; and

`(C) actions that could be taken to speed deployment of such technologies.

`SEC. 707. PRESIDENTIAL RESPONSE AND RECOMMENDATIONS.

`(a) Agency Actions- The President shall direct relevant Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions identified in the reports submitted under sections 705 and 706, and to address any shortfalls identified in such reports, not later than July 1, 2015, and every 4 years thereafter.

`(b) Plan- In the event that the Administrator or the National Academy of Sciences has concluded, in the most recent report submitted under section 705 or 706 respectively, that the United States will not achieve the necessary domestic greenhouse gas emissions reductions, or that global actions will not maintain safe global average surface temperature and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration thresholds, the President shall, not later than July 1, 2015, and every 4 years thereafter, submit to Congress a plan identifying domestic and international actions that will achieve necessary additional greenhouse gas reductions, including any recommendations for legislative action.

I dunno. If it’s innocent it seems the biggest Congressional power grab since the Tenure of Office Act, since it orders the President to direct his Cabinet as Congress sees fit. (by contrast, the AUMF on Iraq gave Bush options; the Freedom of Information Act addresses federal agencies directly. Barack Obama cannot draft an executive order that “Congress shall direct its committees…”) Taken literally, a President Limbaugh would not be permitted to refuse to direct the Department of Energy to use eminent domain against power plants.

That seems a lot less likely than Vitter’s simple explanation. If the EPA reports we’re not winning the war on Global Warming, and the National Academy reports it would really help electric cars if all gas-guzzlers were imported because nobody made them in America (“market-based barriers to commercial deployment”) and suggest the Treasury Department (“relevant Federal agencies”) through TARP to roll US auto makers into a industrial board to achieve the same mission Obama set out for Government Motors (“actions that could be taken to speed deployment of such technologies”), it wouldn’t matter if Rush Limbaugh were President, he “shall direct relevant Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions identified in the reports submitted under sections 705 and 706″. If Obama is still President, there’d be no reluctance at all.

So I guess it comes down to how brazen you think Washington could get.

Patriot Vet on November 10, 2009 at 1:53 PM

Glad you put that. Last numbers I recall seeing, we were ~388 ppm or so.

Not quite to 388, maybe in 2010. They will not have this years numbers for a couple of months.

The last nine years: ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt
2000 369.40
2001 371.07
2002 373.17
2003 375.78
2004 377.52
2005 379.76
2006 381.85
2007 383.71
2008 385.57

Of course, in that time frame, we might have the ’smart grid’ in place, and they could do the controlling that way.

The Smart Grid is going to take quite some time to get online. And yes, they most certainly will be able to control your power use through that. But it really doesn’t matter since power companies have already been doing just that. To save the planet….of course!

Mich. Investigates Freezing Death of 93-Year-Old
By SCOTT MICHELS
Jan. 27, 2009—
The Michigan Attorney General’s Office is reviewing the case of a 93-year-old man who died of hypothermia after a municipal power company restricted his use of electricity.
…
The temperature inside his house was below 32 degrees and the water in the kitchen sink had frozen, said Dr. Kanu Virani, the Oakland County deputy chief medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Schur.
Virani said he believes Schur died a slow, painful death.
…
But Belleman told the AP that a city utility worker had installed a limiter to restrict the use of power at Schur’s home. A limiter controls the amount of power used by a home and can blow out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6740934&page=1

Romeo13 on November 10, 2009 at 1:38 PM

I am not sure I agree with you on state secession being a designed check (if that was your implication), tho’ it be a functional one. The Civil War removed secession as an factor only via military force, not because an argument was conclusively decided on a rational plane about what the defences of liberty should be. Instead, the argument was abandoned–until now. Having said that, it’s not something I’ve ever really thought about or avocated, especially for now.

I highly agree with you that grand juries–and to that matter, juries–should be a check on the power of the state. And the fact that I am routinely using the word “state” now instead of “government” unfortunately means that I feel that the government, to a certain extent, has divorced itself from the people. For in America the government and people should be as one, and there should be no “state”. But if the solons are going to make laws for the people despite the objections of the people, because they feel that the people must be taken care of despite themselves, and that the solons now better, then we have a “state”, and not a government, for the government has sundered itself from the people and has decided to rule them, not be of them. In America it is supposed to be “of, by, for” the people, not just “for”.

As far as watchlists, perhaps in a few disjointed precincts of the Department of Justice and Homeland Security populated by liberals who will excuse a Bill Ayers or Hasan on one hand and keep tabs on a “Romeo13″ with another, even as their mouths revolt at the idea of uttering the name “J. Edgar Hoover”. In time this threat will grow, but as for the moment I do not think it a serious one.

I believe the real trouble lies with the various leftist groups that the Democratic party finds useful, of the ilk of ACORN, SEIU, etc; as well as bloggers and political operatives. I have no doubts there that they constantly look for ways to discredit opponents, and constantly keep tabs on what they say so that the words can come back to haunt them. Well, fair enough.

And as the efforts of those who favor LGF shows, sometimes when the words are not there they will be manufactured. I think if this Republic is going to live the methods of Alinsky are going to have be shunned.

But what I really wonder about is if any of these efforts go beyond mere keeping track of what pseudonym A said about X. Do our friends on the left, perchance, get a little more “active”? Are there private eye snoops going around, that kind of thing? Some would call this paranoid, but on the other hand, a political culture and faith that will countenance allowing someone not to be charged with a crime because he has helped your cause (Andrew Sullivan); a political culture that only sotto voce condemns union goons beating up protesters (Gadney incident); a political culture that drives supporters to bite off the fingers of health-care protesters (Thousand Oaks, CA); is one that will not blanche at making sure that those who could one day be of impact in politics will be oppo’d and discredited long before they ever become a threat. Alinsky, after all, is at heart a book of the left. Why then should we not believe that they do not follow its precepts to their logical conclusion?

The Carrie Prejean video tape is perhaps only the latest case of this trend. Regardless of whether she reduced her lawsuit demands or no, that video was going to be released by those lawyers–and those that gave it to them–simply because they either did not like her personally or they did not like he politics, and wanted to kill her socially. And so they have.

I think we are at the point where there is a critical mass out there of those who fully embrace the idea that only avowed liberals have the functional right to privacy. All others will be destroyed socially, must be destroyed socially, for the “good of the cause”. And that’s the humor of it, though I find it be a bad humor, and not good; a rank swampy miasma that will in the end cause great illness in the body politic.

Glad you put that. Last numbers I recall seeing, we were ~388 ppm or so. Of course, in that time frame, we might have the ‘smart grid’ in place, and they could do the controlling that way. Somehow, I don’t think they’ll wait that long.

If this isnt the definition of a totalitarian usurpation of everything, I don’t know what would be!

TEAM OBAMA HAS NOT EARNED THE BENIFIT OF DOUBT!

Archimedes on November 10, 2009 at 1:59 PM

Sometimes I fear that the HotAir “leadership” has gone full blown RINO.

Take this into consideration from a big picture paradigm:

The House has passed legislation regulating your home garden, will drive the small/family farmer out of business and effectively asserted control over our food supply.

http://www.ftcldf.org/news/news-02mar2009.htm

With the creation atop our Trillions of barrels of our shale-oil reserves, virtually assures foreign dependancy for as far as the eye can see.( http://wildmustangcoalition.org/ )Usually the EPA takes under review 1-2 applications for endangered status of a species per year, with requisite land set asides reccommended. As of July that has jumped to 760 so far this year. This is nothing less than the commandeering of our natural resources, be they on private or public lands.

Your ability to clean out your attic and/or garage to raise extra cash in these hard times, is also soon to be verbotten. They have effectively outlawed the sale of your personal belongings in the name of “the children”, of course.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/05/07/your-yard-sale-is-illegal

The healthcare fiasco has been covered ad nauseum, but suffice it to say that once they become responsible for your health costs, they will have a right
to insure that you lead a “healthy” lifestyle, as Ebelious made clear with their intent to outlaw smoking in the services.

With the authority to monitor, regulate and allot energy consumption, they take over all aspects of modern life.

With each weekend they take over ever more banks seizing control of our mortgages, and therefore our homes, which as of 9/1/09 was already 56% percent of all households in the US.

They are now working to nationalize our educational system even further, damn near making it complete, with assumpumtion of all student loans.

With proposed bailout of newspapers and diversity regs over our media and the internet through supposed “net-neutrality”, we have the de facto take over of allowable information.

Through the ever expanding efforts of Barney Frank, usurpation of the fincial system, and thus all the assets contained there-in. In other words, our money!

Though I am sure I forgotten something and left it out, let us review what we have so far, Gov’t in absolute control of:

1) Food…check!

2) Natural resources…check!

3) Personal belongings…check!

4) Health maintenance…check!

5) Homes/mortgages…check!

6) Education …check!

7) Information access…check!

8) Ability to flee the building nightmare, i.e. liquid assets…check!

If this isnt the definition of a totalitarian usurpation of everything, I don’t know what would be!

TEAM OBAMA HAS NOT EARNED THE BENIFIT OF DOUBT!

The language is too extensive to copy here, but Section 705 does create a trigger of 450 parts per million of greenhouse gases

Ed, while it says “gases”, they are talking specifically about CO2. No other GHG is at that level, so we know that much.

The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months.

I am sorry, but that is not true. I have no idea who at that lab said that, but they are way off the mark. Here are the numbers for the 49 years we have been collecting data for CO2 from Hawaii:

Annual Mean
Growth Rate
Mauna Loa, Hawaii
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Raw data: ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_gr_mlo.txt

year ppm/yr

1959 0.95
1960 0.51
1961 0.95
1962 0.69
1963 0.73
1964 0.29
1965 0.98
1966 1.23
1967 0.75
1968 1.02
1969 1.34
1970 1.02
1971 0.82
1972 1.76
1973 1.18
1974 0.78
1975 1.10
1976 0.92
1977 2.09
1978 1.31
1979 1.68
1980 1.80
1981 1.43
1982 0.72
1983 2.16
1984 1.37
1985 1.24
1986 1.51
1987 2.33
1988 2.09
1989 1.27
1990 1.31
1991 1.02
1992 0.43
1993 1.35
1994 1.90
1995 1.98
1996 1.19
1997 1.96
1998 2.93
1999 0.94
2000 1.74
2001 1.59
2002 2.56
2003 2.29
2004 1.56
2005 2.55
2006 1.69
2007 2.17
2008 1.66

Total: 70.84 ppm / 49 # years = 1.44 ppm/year average

At the average of 1.44 ppm per year, it will take 44 years to get to 450 ppm. At 2 ppm a year, it will take 32 years. The scientist that they talked to does not know what he is talking about. That is part of the problem with this issue, scientists who distort reality.

Here’s how: The bills require a federal declaration of a “climate emergency” if world greenhouse gas levels reach 450 parts per million. Guess what? The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months.

It depends on where the CO2 level is measured. Most scientists (on both sides of the issue) use the observations on Mauna Loa in Hawaii as the benchmark CO2 level, which is right now about 389 ppm and rising about 1 ppm per year. It may eventually reach 450 ppm (until CO2 absorption by plants catches up with emission rates), but long after Obama is out of office, unless Der Obamafuhrer convinces Congress and 38 state legislatures to repeal the 22nd Amendment.

Vitter does have a point that we shouldn’t give the President too much power to impose draconian restrictions based on some “scientific” measurement. For example, who decides WHICH “global average temperature” is to be used to determine whether temperatures have risen 3.6 F over “pre-industrial” levels? There are many different “averages” which use different methods and include different datasets, and how can one ensure that the “pre-industrial” levels used for comparison used the same monitors with the same accuracy, without any bias in the data?

If such draconian powers are vested in one person, what’s to prevent Obama or some future crooked President from shaking a soda bottle under a CO2 monitor, spraying it with concentrated CO2 and then declaring a national emergency based on fudged data?

This bill, like the PelosiCare, needs to be killed in the Senate.

Horatius on November 10, 2009 at 1:28 PM

We are to the point in this Great Nation, where we need to have a debate on What the Constitution is… ie… a limited Government document as our Founders wanted? or a Document that gives unlimited Federal Power, as the Federal Government, through its own Courts, have interpreted it to be.

IMO, this is the next great debate, but NEITHER of the entrenched Political Parties want this debate, as they have BOTH been guilty of abusing the Constitution.

Early on, there were three checks on Constitutional Power… the Seperation of Powers of the Federal Government, the States through the Senate and their ability to LEAVE the Union, and the People through Grand Jurys.

Grand Jurys were neutered by Federal Law.

States being directly represented in the Senate was destroyed by Constitutional Amendment.

States leaving the Union was destroyed by the Civil War.

Thus, there is NO check left on Federal Power, which is NOT in Federal hands.

This condition is unstable, and as its in Governments NATURE to try to gain more power (for the public good of course /sarc), and because NO Government has EVER given up power unless forced?

I’m sure I’m already on watch lists somewhere… so I will just say… We will live in Interesting Times… in the Chinese curse meaning…

You know the defense department is a federal agency, it could take steps to reduce emissions, for example bombing Iran’s oil refineries to reduce the amount of gasoline they are able to produce and consume.

agmartin on November 10, 2009 at 1:26 PM

Nice work thinking outside the box.

And in the great Ratification debates, if the founding generation had genuinely meant for legislation to be able to be made at the federal level for “general welfare” of the social kind, then surely there would have been discussion on it, either pro or con? They discussed everything else, didn’t they? So if there is no discussion in the debate, then using the Preamble as a justification would be the basest kind of intellectual sophistry.

The Preamble is simply not a clause that one can take words out of to hang legislation on. Period. We do so because people wish to do so, want to do so, find it convenient to the will, because they wish the legislation, and integrity be the one to be hanged, not the legislation. As was once said, “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises a formidable outcry in defence of custom.” Even so with the expansion of the Federal powers since the New Deal.

This expansion may be a wise thing, it may not, but it clearly is not authorized by the Constitution and it is time we grew up, admitted that fact, and started rationally discussing what governments should do, and at which level–local, state, or federal–they should do it.

Else, we will find that the Constitution is not a bulwark of our liberties against new forms of state tyranny and corruption because the main form of defense it provided for us–preventing abuse of power by not authorizing the government from being able to do potentially tyrannical acts to start with–we long ago abandoned as “quaint”, and now, even as with men on a ship that has drifted near a lee shore and the wind being against, we are are rapidly trying to figure out how to safely anchor and the storm ride out.

But we may find that unless we forthrightly demand that a logical course of action be set upon and the ship properly manned and steered, we will find ourselves wracked upon the rocks, castaways of liberty marooned on a desert isle, never to return to the ports of that shining city upon a hill, another frail ark of liberty stove in by the great Leviathan that is power. Sad is the fate, and sad will be our fate, unless we start showing firm resolve that not everything Congress wishes Congress gets to do.