https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnUrnqkvSgI
(Video above: Sen. Sessions hears testimony on Obama’s environmental agenda)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a hearing Wednesday for the Environmental and Public Works Committee, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) took the opportunity to take a swing at the Obama Administration’s bureaucratic regulatory expansion in the area of environmental policy.
“The American people are getting frustrated that we have individuals executing policies that affect their everyday life, driving up the cost of their whole existence, based on legal theories that are so tenuous as to be almost breathtaking in its thinness,” Sessions said. “So here we are, [with] a group of elitists in this country through the thinnest of legal arguments, imposing huge costs on the American economy, and I’m worried about it.”
Sessions stressed that the EPA is overextending its authority under laws such as the Clean Air Act to perform duties that Congress never intended. “Congress has not voted for it, it would never vote for it, the American people are not for it,” he said. “This is not democracy in action.”
Many of the EPA’s new regulations, including the “Waters of the United States” rule, vastly expand the Federal Governments ability to control intrastate activity at unprecedented levels. This rule and others could have a significant impact on Alabama’s economy, particularly the farming and forestry industries.
While discussing the ability of unelected unaccountable political bodies to create regulations out of thin air, Sessions brought up the Trade Promotion Authority and the Trans-Pacific Partnership that has supposed environmental motives.
Jeremy A. Rabkin, a professor of law at George Mason School of Law in D.C., testified with regards to the TPP, “It’s bad to disappoint foreigners but its also bad to disappoint Americans. And if you’re elected by Americans maybe you should take the American reaction more seriously.”
Sessions concluded by saying that Congress needs only to defund these agencies to take expanded powers away from the executive branch.
“The power of the purse remains maybe the only realistic option to reign in a president spending money on programs that the American people don’t agree with.”
You can watch the entire exchange in the video above.
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