A Secret White House Power Grab Is In Full Swing

Driving the push for this massive power grab and circumvention of the elected branches is a key White House official who avoided Senate confirmation by being installed not as EPA director, but instead as White House Climate Czar: Carol Browner.

Long before the Supreme Court ruled in a highly questionable 2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA, that the EPA has the legal authority to justify its proposed 18,000 pages of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act, Browner (then EPA director under President Bill Clinton) had her general counsel, Jonathan Cannon, prepare a now-infamous memorandum arguing—for the first time—that the EPA possessed such a power. At the time it was dismissed as a wild-eyed overreach that Congress would never allow. Now it’s happening, and Browner is right at the center of it.

Mary Nichols, the chair of the California Air Resources Board, has confirmed that Browner was the lead White House negotiator in establishing new automobile emissions standards, which for the first time rely on EPA’s presumed authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the 1970 Clean Air Act. Nichols told The New York Times that Browner quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials. “We put nothing in writing, ever,” Nichols said.

Left unchecked, Browner will move beyond automobiles to EPA’s entire staggering 18,000-page blueprint for regulating the U.S. economy. It will eventually regulate everything that moves (light-duty trucks, heavy-duty trucks, buses, motorcycles, planes, trains, ships, boats, tractors, mining equipment, RVs, lawn mowers, fork lifts, and just about every other piece of equipment that has a motor) and lots of things that don’t (any building over 100,000 square feet could be pulled in, along with smaller carbon dioxide emitters, like restaurants, schools, and hospitals that have commercial kitchens with gas burners).

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