Schumer Encourages Biden to Make Big Power Grab by Declaring 'Climate Emergency'
One of the Democrats’ top leaders in Congress wants Congress cut out of President Joe Biden’s plans for the country.
That was the message Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered Monday in an MSNBC interview when he suggested Biden declare a national emergency over “climate change” — the liberals’ favorite boogeyman.
Then Biden could reorder American lives without even a law to back him up.
Schumer made the point clear in an interview with leftist host Rachel Maddow, when he declared point-blank that Biden “can do many, many things under the emergency powers of a president that he could do without legislation.”
“Now Trump used his emergency for a stupid wall, which wasn’t an emergency. But if there ever was an emergency, climate is one.”
WATCH: Senate Majority Leader Schumer calls on President Biden to “explore” using emergency powers to declare climate an emergency.
“If there ever was an emergency, climate is one” pic.twitter.com/Zpnd03kPVD
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) January 26, 2021
It should be unusual for the man who’s in charge of the upper chamber of Congress, where legislation is passed, to want the president to operate outside the legislative process, but Schumer knows full well that Republicans in the Senate will stand against the kind of laws Democrats fantasize about in their Green New Deal dreams.
He has to know the American people won’t willingly accept the kind of costs the Green New Deal would impose on the public.
So if the president declares a climate “emergency” – invoking the sweeping powers granted to the office in what are supposed to be extraordinary conditions — Democrats will be able to achieve their goals without elected politicians like Schumer and his barely-there Senate majority having to defend at the ballot box.
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And Schumer was right. There are “many, many things” a president can do after declaring an emergency. As a Politico commentary piece noted last week, the powers involved are sobering.
“These include authorities not just to reallocate military construction funds, as Trump did for his border wall, but to take over radio stations, control domestic transportation and suspend the prohibition against government testing of chemical agents on unwitting human subjects,” wrote Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law.
“There are also powers that allow the president to detail members of the U.S. armed forces to other nations and to prohibit or limit the export of any agricultural commodity.”
Goitein’s shot at Trump’s invocation of a national emergency to get the funds to build a wall at the southern border aside, the point of the piece was that Congress should limit in the president’s abilities — any president’s abilities — under the National Emergencies Act.
(In fact, its headline was “Trump Showed How Easily Presidents Can Abuse Emergency Powers. Here’s How Congress Can Rein Them In.”)
Schumer’s message to Maddow was exactly the opposite. He wants Biden to invoke a national emergency precisely to circumvent the legislative process, ruling, as Biden’s Democratic predecessor and previous boss Barack Obama did, by “pen and phone.”
And naturally, any Biden decision would fall on the American people. His policies wouldn’t affect huge polluters like China.
What they would do, like his decision to rejoin the ludicrously flawed Paris agreement on climate change, is impose constraints on the American economy and more hardships on the American people.
And this at a time when environmentally-friendly practices are already taking effect — the U.S. was a world leader in reducing carbon dioxide emissions even before the coronavirus pandemic struck the global economy.
What Schumer is really saying is another version of the Democratic maxim: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
A “climate change” emergency is actually perfect for Democrats. It’s an emotionally charged article of faith as much as it is a scientific debate, it puts a premium on virtue-signaling — though it’s at the expense of real-world Americans — and it is, literally, endless (or as endless as anything in the human experience).
What Schumer is suggesting would be a power grab like no other.
If Biden invokes a national emergency on climate, as Schumer said, he can do “many, many things” — while cutting Congress out of his plans.
And if that means cutting the American people out, too, Democrats like Schumer are just fine with that.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
