On the recordDecember 11, 2014
I have said before on the Senate floor that the proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations to limit carbon dioxide are an example among far too many of Executive overreach by this administration. Anyone who knows the history of the Clean Air Act--and I was here for the last major revision in 1990--or who has read the text of that law knows it was never intended to address greenhouse gases or climate change. The Clean Air Act is designed to address traditional pollutants that have a direct impact on human health and the environment. However, when Congress declined to pass legislation supported by President Obama that would have created a cap-and-trade system targeted at greenhouse gases, the President gave a speech saying he would act on his own. In trying to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which was not designed for that purpose, the EPA had to fit a square peg in a round hole. As a result, when a number of key provisions in the Clean Air Act didn't say what the EPA would like them to say, the EPA simply reinterpreted those provisions to say something different or ignored them. In effect, the EPA was unconstitutionally rewriting a law passed by the Congress. We all know what article I, section 1 of the U.S. Constitution says: ``All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . .…
