Waxman-Markey Passes:
Job-killing Legislation Crafted by Men who Never Created a Job
Job-killing Legislation Crafted by Men who Never Created a Job
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While my Congressman has, to his credit, never taken an earmark to benefit our district, he has also never held a job in the sector he so delights in regulating. He doesn’t understand how money is made, innovation fostered and jobs created. For over forty years, Henry Waxman has served in government, six years in the California Assembly in Sacramento before being elected to Congress in 1974.
Together with his Bay State colleague Ed Markey, who has spent nearly as long as his California elder in elective office (elected to the Massachusetts House just a year after graduating from law school), Waxman has crafted a bill (all in the interest of stopping “global warming”) which would regulate industries which have created the joband fostered the innovation which these two Democrats have created only in their minds and with their words. We’re talking about Cap & Trade.
They don’t understand how regulation hampers innovation. They don’t understand the burdens federal legislation places on those who generate the wealth which fuels our prosperity and which pays for these men’s government sinecures. Indifferent to openness, the transparency their party’s candidate for President touted on the campaign trail, they plop a 300-page amendment into the legislation in the wee hours of the morning, giving legislators less than a day to consider this lengthy addition before voting on it.
And they got eight Republicans to go along with this unexamined regulatory scheme when over forty (just about one for each year of Waxman’s legislative service) Democrats jumped ship. Couldn’t they at least have said while they’re open to this legislation, they didn’t want to vote on something they hadn’t had time to read and consider and discuss with their constituents? As Ricky Ricardo often said to Lucy, they’ve “got some ‘splainin to do.”
The bad news is that these eight Republicans gave Waxman and Markey the votes they needed to pass their burdensome bill. The good news is that the President and the Democratic leadership couldn’t strong arm those forty-four representatives, more than one-sixth of their caucus. It’s a sign of the President’s diminishing clout and perhaps an indication that he won’t have any easy task ramming his health care “reforms” through.
In her piece on the vote (which I highly reommend), Jennifer Rubin points out the sheer folly of this legislation, noting that one reason Republicans voted overwhelmingly against the bill, “declaring it to be madness to vote for a huge tax, job-killing bill in a recession.” Maybe my Congressman might have thought twice before introducing this legsilation if he had any experience creating jobs.
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