The Shut Up and Swallow Congress

Deliberation in Washington is dead.
We don`t have legislators. We have lemmings. We don`t
have debates. We have high-speed hysteria sessions.
After ramming through stimulus legislation that no one
read and bailout bills that no one understood, Congress
is now poised to stuff down taxpayers` throats a
deficit-exploding $3.5 trillion budget that enshrines
the largest tax increase in American history.

Welcome to the cap-and-trade
[expletive deleted] sandwich.

The Democrats want to rig the game
so you don`t have time to figure out this latest act of
collective thievery before it`s perpetrated. They have
been colluding on a plan to circumvent the Senate`s
60-vote threshold and amendment process by attaching
their massive green tax scheme to a special budget
legislative maneuver ("budget
reconciliation" in the parlance of the Washington
sausage-makers). No less than Democratic Sen. Robert
Byrd criticized this short-circuiting of debate as an
"outrage that
must be resisted" and


"an undemocratic disservice to our people." But
the eco-zealots on the Hill seem hell-bent on telling
Americans to shut up and swallow.

On the Senate floor Tuesday,
Republicans valiantly tried to stop the cap-and-trade
bullet train — only to be met with histrionic
entreaties from the likes of Sens. Barbara Boxer and
Dick Durbin shrieking about floods, dinosaurs and The
Children. Boxer and Durbin indignantly accused GOP
senators of
"fear-mongering" over the costs of radical
greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Then, without
missing a beat, the Democrats returned to their wild
predictions of the earth fizzling up and their
grandchildren perishing like the prehistoric creatures
who once roamed our doomed planet.

GOP Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama,
Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and John Thune of South
Dakota pushed back. President Obama, the Republicans
noted, said last week that the cap-and-trade component
of his budget is
"nonnegotiable." This global warming reduction
proposal amounts to an unprecedented national energy tax
on every man, woman and child. Every household. Every
business.

Far-reaching and regressive, the
White House`s own budget officials first pegged the
price tag at $646 billion, but admitted to Senate
staffers that the actual number would be
"two to three
times" that figure — which means an estimated $1.3
trillion and $1.9 trillion between fiscal years 2012 and
2019 by the Obama number-crunchers` (or rather,
number-cookers`) own calculations.

There`s no pretense about the
impact these measures will have on taxpayers:
"Under my plan of
a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would
necessarily skyrocket," Obama

admitted during the 2008 campaign.
"That will cost
money. They will pass that money on to consumers."

White House Office of Management
and Budget Director Peter Orszag again

acknowledged last week that
"much of (the)
costs of the plan will be passed along to consumers in
the form of higher prices for energy and energy
intensive goods." The GOP puts the cost at
approximately $3,100 per family a year. Team Obama
promises to offset these costs with some sort of tax
credit for families, but by the budget team`s own
admission, families would still pay at least $500 per
year in out-of-pocket increased energy costs above and
beyond the credit. Retirees and college students
wouldn`t be eligible for the tax rebates.

This is not
"fear-mongering."
It`s fact-mongering. And these facts deserve to be fully
weighed and laid on the legislative table before
Washington lawmakers take action again to drastically
alter the economic landscape — and stick us with the
bill.

But once again, the big spenders in
Washington can`t be bothered with the deliberative
process. They have learned nothing from the AIG bailout
rush-and-take-back debacle. Or the porkulus waste
debacle. Or the TARP-you-can`t-believe-in debacle. The
lemmings will only contemplate the consequences of their
Chicken Little actions
after  they`ve sent the
economy permanently over the cliff.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin [email
her] is author of

Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists,
Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.
Click

here for Peter Brimelow`s review. Click

here for Michelle Malkin`s website.
Michelle Malkin`s latest book is "Unhinged:
Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."