Posted on 06/21/2010 3:02:19 AM PDT by Scanian
The cap-and-trade bill that the House passed last summer aims to force Americans to reduce those dreaded carbon emissions by 83 percent in less than four decades -- to the same per-capita level as 1867. Yet, even under the Al Gore-approved climate-science models, the bill would do nothing to stop global warming.
The bill is 1,000-plus pages of rules, regulations, handouts, subsidies and whatever else House leaders deemed necessary. Not one of the 435 members read the whole monstrosity -- because the leadership dropped 300 new pages on their desks the night before they voted.
Yet the central point is clear enough: The bill simply drives up the price of fossil-fuel based energy so high that the nation will have to somehow get along with only 17 percent of the gasoline and fossil-fuel-powered electricity that it uses today.
Don't ask how much it will cost. No one really knows, since you can't put a price on something that has yet to be defined.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
This is the way the Democrats have governed. Mysterious forces in the background prepare legislation. Reid and Pelosi persuade the Democrat majority to vote for the legislation before they have even read it.
This is not representative democracy. This is tyranny. We must get the Democrats out of power and make sure they never get in power again.
I’d personally like to see a rule inserted into the constitution that a member of congress can only vote on a bill...if he signs it and says he actually read the bill. And a second rule ought to be considered...limiting bills to just 100 pages or less. I think this 1000-plus page era....is a joke. Would we write a 2,700 page Constitution today? Is this what the technology age has brought us....1,000 plus-page bills?
“says he actually read the bill.”
Given the level of mendacity in Congress, such declarations would be largely meaningless. Let’s change the rule to not being able to vote unless the member has sat silently untethered to any form of electronic technology (cell phones, computers, Ipods) and listened to the clerk read the entire bill first. Under such a rule, I think we would be astonished at how quickly Congress manages to pare these monstrosities down to a manageable size.
A bill that forces Congress to abide by every law it passes surely would be a useful check on its abuse of power. However, in this instance, Americans ought to insist that Congress itself provide a mini-demonstration that it is feasible to cut emissions by 83%. After all, if it is not, then imposing this requirement on the entire nation is a sheer waste of time and effort. Congress should not be allowed to enact this bill until all of its members have reduced their carbon emissions by 83% (no cheating by buying carbon offsets).
In the best case, this will deep-six the bill. In the worst case, it will prevent Congresscritters from jetting all over the world on junkets and all over the country pontificating on matters they know nothing about.
"It's shocking that politics has intruded into science, when in fact the way we do science is with public money. How do you expect that NOT to happen?"
"Cap & trade will give the average American the emissions that we had back in 1867."
Term Limits.
Politicians can no longer be trusted so they must be regulated. The people of the Unites States needs a kill switch.
That's not a bad idea. However, they could always pull the trick of having "readers" speed read the law aloud to Congress like they did once last year. No one can make heads or tails out of what the bill actually says under such circumstances, but they can all say that they have "read" the bill.
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