In Praise of Bureaucrats

By Sara Robinson

Created 06/28/2010 - 5:56pm

Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room calls out the "Climate Peacocks" in Congress [1] who are ostentatiously shaking their tailfeathers in mock outrage over the very idea that the Environmental Protection Agency might actually act as agents of environmental protection:

Earlier this month, 47 senators — every Republican and six Democrats — voted for Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific global warming endangerment finding, finalized after years of delay in following a Supreme Court mandate to obey the language of the Clean Air Act.

Twenty of Murkowski’s supporters claimed they voted to reject science in order to preserve the “balance of power” between the legislative and executive branch. They said that they had to overturn the EPA’s scientific finding because setting pollution limits should instead be the job of the elected members of Congress. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) even said he voted for Murkowski to “ensure that Congress keeps its responsibility to establish our nation’s environmental regulations.”