Exactly Right

House Minority Leader John Boehner is not exactly my favorite politician in the world, but he was exactly right last evening when he answered Rep. Henry Waxman's attempt to shut him up with this:

"The gentleman's had his thirty years to put this bill together, and the house is going to spend a whopping five hours debating the most profound piece of legislation to come to this floor in a hundred years. And uh...and the chairman has the audacity to drop a three hundred plus page amendment in the hopper at 3:09 A.M. this morning. And so I would ask my colleagues, don't you think the American people expect us to understand what's in this bill before we vote on it?"

Real Clear Politics has the video.

Just 14 hours after dropping a 310 page amendment into an already far-reaching and massive bill, one that was issued  out of committee in "final" form only two days before, our House of Representatives approved it after a measly five hours of floor debate.

There is still hope that this boondoggle can be stopped in the US Senate. If you haven't been paying much attention to the issue, I urge you to start now. If you are wondering why, or if it even has an impact on you, stop and take a look around the room you are in. If this legislation is enacted, it is going to artificially raise the future cost of 80% or more of the energy used to produce, transport, and sell to you everything in that room. Ditto for everything in your refrigerator. That's just the raw cost of energy. Heaven knows what the costs will be from the thousands of regulations that will be issued because of this legislation.

I am not opposed to seeing the world move to non-carbon based energy. I am also not opposed to subsidizing basic research to try to make those energy sources cost effective replacements to burning coal, oil, or gas. What this bill does though, is coerce us into adopting conservation and energy production methods that are not cost effective now. If they were, the market would have embraced them already. We are going to pay billions for that in prices and taxes, billions that we might better spend on health care, education, and yes, a better standard of living for future generations.

Regardless of what one thinks about climate change, we ought to have the intelligence, decency, and just plain common sense to discuss exactly what we are doing here. That the Democratic leadership does not want that to happen, in fact is desperate to avoid it, should tell you everything you need to know.