Trump’s SCOTUS Keeps #Winning With EPA Decision

The Supreme Court in Washington on Sept. 21, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Commentary

Thank you, Donald Trump, for “packing”—in your way, not the Democrats’ way—the Supreme Court with sensible people.

Finally, we’re beginning to take the years ago advice of Nat King Cole to “Straighten Up and Fly Right” (in more ways than one).

First came the long overdue overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing the states and the people in them to make their own decisions about abortion (imagine that!).

Now, that great religion substitute, the sainted Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has been brought at least partially to heel by a 6–3 vote of the court.

And, mirabile dictu, Chief Justice John Roberts himself wrote (pdf) the wise decision (there’s a first), as quoted here at The Epoch Times:

“While ‘[c]apping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Roberts wrote, quoting a 1992 precedent, “it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d)” of the Clean Air Act.

“A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”

Of course. Just like Roe v. Wade, decisions of this nature in any sort of democratic government belong to the people—or as close as we can get to them, meaning legislatures—not to the judiciary or, least of all, unelected officials hidden (often for years) in some agency, beholden only to themselves and their patrons.

End of story. But let’s take this a bit further. Has there been anything in the last few decades more open to corruption and boondoggles than the self-righteous, virtue-signaling devotion to the “environment”?

Well, maybe now the vaccines are giving it a run for its money.

The irony is almost all of us love nature and seek to protect it, but the pompous tyrants who call themselves “environmentalists” act as if we don’t, condemning us any time we dissent in the slightest from their religion—this, even though we all know, or should, it’s what you do, not what you say that counts.

Speaking of which, the large Washington demonstrations by the supposedly ultra-right Tea Party Movement (2009) were reported to have been remarkably self-policed and devoid of garbage. Those of the left, like the pink-hatted (being discrete here) mass reaction to Trump’s 2016 election left the nation’s capital an unholy mess.

All through this time, Al Gore and quite a number of others have made massive fortunes through scams like carbon credits while, we all also know at this point, flying about in private jets to the most expensive redoubts on the planet to tell us all how to live.

John Kerry, America’s first “special envoy for climate,” who seems to spend more time in those private planes than most of us do in bed, has a personal carbon footprint the size of Brooklyn and is well known for docking his $7 million yacht in neighboring Rhode Island to avoid a half million in taxes from his home state of Massachusetts.

I have a personal note of my own to add, having attended, for PJ Media, the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in the midst of the biggest blizzard I had ever encountered—and I went to college in New Hampshire.

I was sitting waiting for one of the panel discussions to begin when, to kill time, I casually addressed the man next to me, asking him where he was from.

“The Maldives,” he said. Amazing, I thought, because I had just read the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean were in danger of extinction, actually going completely under water, because of global warming.

So, trying to be polite, I commiserated with him about the peril to his homeland, but he just shrugged.  “Is nothing,” he explained. “We put up sandbags against tide. We do every year. No problem.”

I looked at him non-plussed. “You came a long way. Why’re you here?”

He squinted at me, as if he thought I was either an idiot or I was kidding. “For the money,” he said flatly.

Incidentally, I see once again that in November 2021, some 12 years after that conference, our friends at ABC are once more reporting “Facing dire sea level rise threat, Maldives turns to climate change solutions to survive.”

What do the French say? The more things change, the more they remain the same?

Good thing Trump came along and “packed” the court, no?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.