RedState Morning BriefingMarch 28, 2012Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
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Yesterday the left descended into madness. The madness came early in the day. It happened shortly after 10 o’clock in the morning. Justice Anthony Kennedy opened his mouth and uttered his first question on the issue of the individual mandate. He asked, “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” The question, the second asked yesterday morning, bothered the left.
As the clock approached 11, Kennedy spoke again, sending shockwaves through the legal community. He stated matter of factly,
“[T]he reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don’t have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that’s generally the rule.
“And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.”
It was the quote heard round the world. It is what the tea party movement, libertarians, conservatives, and so many private citizens have been saying. It was an expression of what nearly every legal scholar on television has pooh-poohed as the troglodyte rhetoric of plebeians not educated enough to understand their own founding compact.
That Justice Kennedy expressed something so obvious to so many Americans that so many well educated legal analysts have mocked for two years as an outmoded view of the constitution put forward only by hicks, rubes, and the racist middle class tea partiers not cool enough to defecate on police cars like the Occupy Wall Street hipsters should deeply, deeply trouble every radio station, newspaper, and television news network along with the American people.
Just how out of touch are the people the news media relies on as legal experts used to help form both their and their audiences’ opinions? More so, is it not abundantly obvious that legal experts let their own partisanship shape their opinions?
All of this, however, overshadows a more important issue — how the hell did a constitutional, democratic republic come to depend on the whims of one man in a black robe who nobody ever elected to anything?
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Yesterday the Obama Administration effectively outlawed coal as a fuel source and it underscores the importance of Congress severely circumscribing the authority of regulatory agencies.
By outlawing new coal-fired electric generation plants and ignoring nuclear power, the Administration has set in motion a plan to make the nation dependent upon natural gas and a mishmash of politically correct but non-viable sources such as solar and wind as older plants are decommissioned. Essentially, Obama has done via regulatory means what it could not accomplish in Congress: to set the trajectory for exorbitant electricity prices in the service of reducing “greenhouse gasses.”
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Given the the administration’s recent moves on coal power, I couldn’t help but wonder how that might affect the President in swing states, should prices rise in coal-burning states.
A check I made this morning suggests that the answer is yes, if coal is an issue in this election, it could swing close states.
Here’s a simple chart of the closeness of a state’s 2008 Presidential election result vs the state’s coal use as a percentage. Source for coal use: the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, but they also cite their sources too if you’d like to dig in. Election margin source: the final column of the Wikipedia chart.
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