We at The Patriot Post continually focus on First Principles, always endeavoring to view current events of import through the fundamental, timeless lens crafted by America’s Founders. Why? Because freedom isn’t free. The responsibility to understand from where Liberty derives and how to maintain it is a duty every freedom-loving individual must keep, or else risk losing. One consequence of our focus is the asymmetric weighting of news we provide to our readers – that is, we highlight news that matters, even though at first blush it may not appear to be important to the mainstream media. Such is the case with the Obama Regime’s implementation of executive-wrought dictats – the so-called “regulations” that ostensibly execute legislated statutes, but in reality fashion brand-new, unconstitutional laws from whole cloth. Take, for example, one arm of the Regime, the Orwellian-titled, “Environmental Protection Agency” (EPA) – which has nothing to do with either the environment or protection. It’s currently being used as a key vessel to expand Big Brother’s involvement in every aspect of U.S. citizens’ lives.

As a background for this particular brand of tyranny, Article I of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress – and only Congress – the authority to make laws that apply to the entire nation. Article II directs the president to execute – that is, to carry out – those laws, but not to make them. In fact, the great French political philosopher, Baron de Montesquieu, whose ideas the Founders used in crafting the U.S. Constitution, stated, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.” In other words, when executive and legislative powers are given to – or as here, commandeered by – a single governmental entity, Liberty cannot exist. Indeed, this administration is providing an object lesson to bear out the legitimacy of Montesquieu’s warning.

In the instant case, Congress never passed legislation to address – let alone “combat” – global warming. The “inconvenient truth” is the EPA has no basis for acting independent of constitutional authorization – though that has certainly been no impediment to this Executive strong-arm. Using its standard, camel’s-nose-under-the-tent tactics, the Chosen Regime has leveraged the 1970 Clean Air Act to ban things the Act was never intended to address. What things? Well, how about virtually anything the EPA “doesn’t like,” for starters? For example, the EPA decided to classify carbon dioxide – the exhaled byproduct of the air we breathe – as a “greenhouse gas” subject to regulation. The implication is the EPA someday may have the power to regulate what kind – or more ominously, how much – air a particular individual may breathe! Never mind the fact no constitutional authority exists for such an overreach.

The EPA – like the rest of the inmates guarding the asylum that is the Obamanation, Part Deux – lives by rule of men, making its own authority as it goes. This, of course, includes levying completely arbitrary standards for pollutant reduction. Sadly, the Supreme Court has failed to do its job of stepping in and declaring these Executive power grabs unlawful, and Congress wants no part of accountability for these acts, one way or another. Thus, the statists’ collusion to trample the people’s rights and freedoms using the “administrative state” – code words for any governmental entity that has executive, judicial and legislative powers but which nonetheless remains wholly unaccountable to the people – continues unabated. Meanwhile, leftist pundits continue to beat their war drums of unconstitutional activism. National Journal’s Lucia Graves, for example, praises Obama’s dictatorial path in her aptly titled piece, “Obama’s Thankfully ‘Dictatorial’ Approach to Climate Change.” Sure: Why not a dictatorship? Isn’t that the principle America was founded upon, after all? If not, what difference does it make?

As noted English statesman, philosopher and freedom-lover Edmund Burke is purported to have said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Thus far, no one has stopped the EPA. We can only hope a few good men are still out there and not content, to quote President Ronald Reagan, in “telling [their] children and [their] children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”