July 21, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
If Biden declares a national climate emergency, it might take another president to rescind it
By Robert Romano
“The President made clear that if the Senate doesn’t act to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen our domestic clean energy industry, he will. We are considering all options and no decision has been made.”
That was the text of an email by a White House official confirming that President Joe Biden is considering declaring a national emergency for climate change utilizing the National Emergencies Act, which among other things, which the President might attempt to use to repurpose limited parts of federal funding to address the emergency or halt off-shore oil drilling and U.S. exports of crude oil.
The push for Biden to take executive action on Democrats’ climate agenda comes as the President lacks in the votes in the Senate for a $300 billion of additional spending for wind, solar and other green energy incentives, subsidies and infrastructure and in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA liberated states to have more robust electricity grids with coal if that’s what they really want.
If the President were to declare a national emergency, Congress would have six months to rescind the emergency, a measure that the President could then veto.
An alternative might be to defund certain executive actions that Biden might take during a climate emergency by inserting the prohibitions into an omnibus spending bill, but then the President could still veto the legislation with the same outcome.
Such a strategy might depend on holding the House and Senate to be sustained, since it could result in a temporary government shutdown. In the past Republicans have shown they will fight to get defunds into law with majorities in both chambers.
If Republicans do not gain legislative supermajorities of two-thirds or greater in the November Congressional midterms, then Biden’s climate emergency would likely persist through his tenure in office.
And that could be for quite a while. As old as Biden is and as unpopular as he currently is, Democratic presidents in recent history have a knack of bouncing back after rocky midterms. Bill Clinton lost control of the House and Senate in 1994 and Barack Obama lost the House in 2010, but both went on to win reelection easily in 1996 and 2012, respectively.
If Biden or his Democratic Party successor were to win 2024, then, a climate emergency might persist all the way until 2028 or longer, depending on how the nation’s internal politics develop. It might take another president to rescind it ultimately.
Don’t like it? Elections matter. Who you vote for president really matters.
In November, elections will matter, too. Congress has always retained the ability to repeal the National Emergencies Act but has never done so, and presidents of both parties have used the law to get parts of their agendas through that might not have been able to pass Congress.
Of course, there are legal limits to what the President can actually accomplish even with an emergency declaration, and would have to undoubtedly defend those actions from challenges in federal court. No guarantees every action would be upheld, and so there is an Article III check on the power, as well.
Therefore, the contours of what the climate emergency entails is even more important than legal or constitutional questions over the President’s powers to declare such an emergency, although with this Supreme Court — which just overturned EPA extralegal action to regulate carbon emissions because Congress never authorized it — it should be said there’s likely never been a better opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the law.
Of course, there is no question Congress authorized the President to declare such emergencies. Since 1976, there have been 60 national emergencies declared, more than 30 of which are still in effect.
Biden’s ultimate consideration, however, may be on a political timeline, as the White House continues to attempt to negotiate with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on climate legislation. So far, Manchin has wanted nothing to do with that.
But perhaps Biden will keep trying until he no longer has Congressional majorities, and if his party loses the midterms, that’s when he’ll start declaring emergencies. We’ll find out soon enough. Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/if-biden-declares-a-national-climate-emergency-it-might-take-another-president-to-rescind-it/
Congress must hold the federal bureaucracy accountable
House Government Reform and Oversight Committee is holding a hearing meant to highlight government employee productivity today. Subcommittee chairman Gerald Comley (D-public employee union) is supposed to highlight a positive story about public employee work ethic during the pandemic. The Biden Whitehouse Director of Office of Management and Budget and the Director of Office of Personnel Management are both scheduled to testify. It is unlikely that Conley will ask these Biden officials about a study that found that 25 percent of Department of Health and Human Services employees failed to logion to their emails even a single time during the height of the pandemic between March and December 2020.
Congress must hold the federal bureaucracy accountable by forcing an audit to determine how many taxpayer-paid (workers) stole their pay by failing to check-in with the office once in ten months. You cannot implement a work-from-home policy if you do not hold those who violated the public trust accountable.
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2022/07/congress-must-hold-the-federal-bureaucracy-accountable/
Karol Markowicz: Those destroying public schools don’t want you thinking about alternatives
By Karol Markowicz
What comes after the end of public schools?
Anyone who cares about the education of children should be asking that question. So of course it’s one that the teachers unions don’t want us to discuss.
New York City schools are in trouble. As The Post reported Friday, “the city Department of Education expects to enroll roughly 28,100 fewer students this fall.” Enrollment at the city’s regular public schools already fell during the pandemic, and this new projection suggests it’s not improving any time soon.
And New York leads a large pack: California, Illinois, Oregon, Mississippi and Michigan have all seen serious losses of students departing their public-school systems.
Why? A Gallup poll last week showed only 28% of Americans have “a great deal or a lot” of “confidence in U.S. public schools.”
Much of this is tied to long closures during the pandemic. Teachers unions, with people like American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten leading the charge, pushed hard to keep schools closed for far too long. The shutdowns (and the travesty of remote learning) smashed public trust and it simply isn’t that easy to rebuild. Researchers at the American Enterprise Institute found that the longer a school district stayed remote, the larger its enrollment drop.
But parents tell me they have many reasons for saying “enough.”
New York City’s crushing of merit-based admissions under Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed people out, as did general woke nonsense replacing academics. Other parents pulled their kids when toddlers stayed masked after the rest of the city had stopped.
Mayor Eric Adams isn’t mincing words: “We have a massive hemorrhaging of students — massive hemorrhaging. We’re in a very dangerous place in the number of students that we are dropping.” But the City Council (clearly lobbied by the teachers union) is pushing for schools to retain funding at the old enrollment numbers. That’s crazy: These schools aren’t meeting families’ needs; they shouldn’t be rewarded for this failure with cash.
Especially because money is so often set on fire in the New York City system. Schools Chancellor David Banks and over 50 other staffers attended a conference last week “at a swanky hotel near Universal Studios in Orlando,” The Post reports. Kids had to zoom to get an education for over a year, but the grownups need to meet up near theme parks to discuss their education plan? Ridiculous.
Public schools are in a serious downward spiral. The options are fixing them, which hasn’t worked for decades, or letting parents get their kids out.
Public charter schools are, understandably, booming despite getting far less funding. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently pointed out, “Charter schools educate 7% of all public-school students, yet they receive less than 1% of total federal spending on K-12 education.”
On average, charters have higher math and reading scores than traditional public schools; Bloomberg notes, “Research has found that the benefits are especially pronounced for Black, Latino and low-income students.”
But the teachers unions hate charters. They hate when parents have choices for their kids.
They also hate outspoken parents fighting for their kids. Weingarten called parents showing up to school board meetings “racists” and has argued that school vouchers, which would give parents a way to get their kids out of failing schools, are “the end of public education as we know it.” To which we all should say: good.
Public education shouldn’t exist to serve Weingarten. It’s our money paying for our children to get an education.
School-choice activist Corey DeAngelis always asks, “Why would giving families a choice ‘end public schools’?” That’s the exact right question.
If parents are finding that the public-school system doesn’t serve their children, we need to give them an option to exit. If they all take that exit, that means their children have been failed by our current public-education model — and that’s a travesty we can’t ignore.
Politicians shouldn’t preserve this failing model because Randi Weingarten wants them to. They should remember: The last time they listened to her, public schools across the country lost over a million students.
After the last few dismal years, our focus can’t be on keeping special-interest groups like Weingarten’s happy. The mantra for us all has to be: Children first.
To view online: https://nypost.com/2022/07/17/those-destroying-public-schools-dont-want-you-thinking-about-alternatives/