Phil Kerpen
November 3, 2009

With the country focused on today’s elections and the ongoing circus-like attempt of Washington to take over our health care, Sen. Barbara Boxer is trying to pull a fast one on cap-and-trade, forcing her outrageous Boxer-Kerry energy ration and tax scheme through the Senate Environment and Public Workers (EPW) Committee this week, while the country is focused on health care. She thinks the American people won’t notice that she is trying to quietly jump-the-gun on legislation that could amount to the biggest tax increase in American history without even waiting for the EPA to run its models and release its official (and almost certainly unrealistically low) estimate of the cost of the bill and its effect on emissions.

Just as we saw the Senate Finance Committee vote out a health care bill that hadn’t even be written, we now see the Senate EPW committee set to pass a bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without knowing any estimate of how it would actually affect emissions or what it would cost. Flying blind seems to be the new business-as-usual in Washington.

It’s a dishonest move in the first place to hide the biggest tax increase in U.S. history inside what’s supposed to be an environmental bill, but we know from internal Treasury documents that the Obama administration is counting on hundreds of billions of dollars a year in so-called “climate revenues” to pay for its big government spending programs.

We also know that Sen. Boxer intends to use a lot of that revenue in corrupt political logrolling to buy the votes she needs to pass the bill. We know because she told us, back on June 6th, when she said:

“There's so much revenue that comes in from a cap-and-trade system that you can really go to a person in a congressional district and get enough votes there by saying, 'What do you need? What do you want? You can really help them.”

No wonder she’s trying to force this hodge-podge of special interest provisions through her committee even though the official analysis by the EPA of what's in the bill and how much is costs hasn't even been done yet!

Kudos to Senate EPW Republicans led by Senator James Inhofe. They are boycotting Barbara Boxer’s ridiculous flying-blind attempt to slam through her outrageous cap-and-trade bill before lawmakers and the public have any really sense of what it would do and cost.

The public has a right to know the economic impact of a bill that would reorder the entire US economy through government control and rationing of energy. If Boxer insists on conducting a sham, partisan mark-up of her bill in the face of the very reasonable request from EPW Republicans to wait until the EPA has run its models, we can be certain the product will be an extreme far-left bill that will place out economic future at enormous risk.

Any senator who votes for Boxer’s bill before it has been fully analyzed by the EPA can only be supporting the bill for the wrong reasons, because its actual effectiveness at reducing emissions—and at what cost—remain completely unknown. Sen. Boxer seems convinced that voters are incapable of paying attention to both health care and energy taxes at the same time. If she continues to recklessly discard Senate rules and traditions to force this costly special-interest bill on the American public, she and her colleagues are likely to learn otherwise about a year from now.

Phil Kerpen is director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

Listen to his two-minute KerpenCast on this subject here.

Click here to take action on this issue!