H.R. 2454: The Cap & Tax Travesty

RUSH: This climate bill, I just got something and I can’t look at it until the next commercial break. But I’m told here that there was a test vote this morning, the House Democrats narrowly won a test vote on ground-breaking legislation to combat global warming. This is so unnecessary, there isn’t any global warming. This bill is not about climate change. It’s not about improving the environment. It’s not about anything but raising taxes and taking away people’s freedom. Folks, we are made of carbon, and what this is is a carbon tax. Theoretically, we could be taxed because of the carbon dioxide we exhale. If they want to figure out how much that is contributing to global warming, we could be taxed on that basis. There’s no limit here once you start taxing carbon. We are made of carbon. We are a carbon-based life form. What this legislation seeks to establish is that we, by virtue of our existence, are destructive polluters who have to be punished. We are polluters whether we want to be or not, because we’re carbon. It is absurd. In all kinds of countries they’re learning that this doesn’t work. Spain, it didn’t work. Australia, it didn’t work.

Kimberley Strassel has a great piece at the Wall Street Journal, which I’m going to cite here in just a moment. This test vote today was 217 to 205 to send Obama and his legislation over to the full House. Thirty Democrats defected. Do you know that there was a tax for cow farts in this bill? Now, Rachel, you watched Gore’s stupid movie and you bought it. I’m telling you, there was a tax on bovine flatulence. This upset a bunch of Democrat Congressmen in agricultural states. So they went in there and they removed the tax on cow farts to get the votes. This is how ridiculous it is. There are Republicans on the fence on this. There ought to be no Republicans on the fence on this. This is another one of these premises where we say: no you won’t. We don’t debate it. We don’t say, okay, we’re going to do global warming legislation. Fine, well, here’s our idea. Our idea on global warming legislation is that there isn’t any global warming. Sunspot activity is way, way down. I’ve got a NASA website series of photos to show you from 2000 to 2009 how the sun’s activity has slowed down. It is cooling off all over the planet.

There is no global warming. Temperatures have not risen in the last nine years in an appreciable way and this legislation is not going to lower temperatures. It’s not going to do anything they claim it’s going to do. Nobody is going to have fully read this. There are over a thousand mandates, meaning limits on freedom, over 1,300 pages. Even the chairman of the committee, Henry Nostrilitis Waxman doesn’t know what’s all in it. It doesn’t matter to him what all is in it. Yesterday I think that I heard there was something like 17,000 or 20,000 calls to Congress opposing this. It’s going to take a lot more than that to stop this. Yesterday it looked like this thing is going to go down to defeat. But at like three or four this morning they offered a 300-page amendment that nobody’s read. But they told the farmers, the Democrats from farm states, agriculture states, yeah, we’re going to take care of you. We’re going to take out some of these punitive things to get their votes. This is signature legislation and it would be very embarrassing if this goes down in defeat. They’re going to have a tougher time in the Senate with it. But it would be best to shut it down in the House of Representatives today, and that’s the vote, and I’m told we’re going to need six to seven votes, it looks like, whereas a couple days ago it seemed to be a slam dunk. So six to seven votes on either the Republican or Democrat side to stop this.

Let me tell you something else that’s happened. I read about this in a lot of different places today. What I have here is a piece from the Competitive Enterprise Institute which summarizes it pretty well. They are making public an internal study on climate science, which was suppressed by the EPA and Lisa Jackson. ‘Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.’ There’s a defector, there’s somebody in the EPA who put together a report: Wait a minute, temperatures are not rising. We can’t prove that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. He cited evidence from around the country; he cited scientific data. By the way, the consensus on climate science that you’ve always heard about on global warming, it’s falling apart. It’s falling apart. Scientists from Australia and two or three other countries have defected from the so-called consensus. That’s what this guy’s report was about. They told him to shut up. They suppressed his report and they said don’t you dare talk about it. They fired him. They said don’t you dare talk to anybody about this.

The point is the Environmental Protection Agency, Obama Administration, they don’t care about the truth in any of this. This is not about global warming. It is not about climate change. It’s about nothing but taxes. It’s taxing everything they can get their hands on. It’s revenue generation. Obama yesterday even had the gall to call this a jobs bill. Well, I’ll tell you what green jobs did to Spain. George Will wrote about it yesterday. The stimulus bill was supposed to be a jobs bill and it didn’t turn out to be a jobs bill, and this is not a jobs bill. This is a jobs-killing bill. Now, I know it’s a tough sell because people listening to me talk about this: Why would our government come up and do something? Folks, I know it’s hard to understand that we’ve elected somebody who is willingly, purposely setting out to deplete the capital in the private sector, to destroy the US economy. I know it’s hard to understand. Most of you don’t have, most of us — I’ll include myself in this — most of us don’t have this concept of that kind of power; of wanting it, wanting to use it for our own personal fun, frolic, frivolity, whatever. We can’t imagine that we have elected somebody who really doesn’t like the United States as it was founded, but that’s what’s happened. This is exactly what we’ve done here.

There was a great piece, and I had it in the stack yesterday. I thought this is a little too esoteric to get into. And I may try to find it and do it again today. It is a piece in the AmericanThinker.com by a woman from Nigeria who says: Barack Obama is no different than any other African colonial. Meaning he’s a despot. The British went in and colonialized all Africa. By the way, her piece tells us why — she doesn’t say this, but if you have a basic knowledge, this piece will instruct you why Obama so often disses the UK. They went in there, they colonialized Africa and they set up despotic leaders and they end up being Marxist, Mugabe and these other guys. This woman from Nigeria thinks that’s exactly what we have here, an African colonial-type president who views this country in ways unlike most Americans view this country, in ways unlike most Democrats view the country. And when I read the piece yesterday, I put it together with what he’s trying to do with healthcare, what he’s trying to do now with this cap-and-trade climate science, all this rotgut, what she says has a lot of credence. I’ll find it. I’ll share it with you as the program unfolds before your very eyes today.

Kimberley Strassel, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, focuses on Australia’s parliament’s efforts to curb their own carbon emission scheme. They had the same thing. They tried to do what we are on the verge of doing. She writes about the Australian parliament’s efforts to curb their own scheme due to many politicians’ doubt in human causes of global warming. More and more Australian politicians are being convinced now that the human contribution to climate change, global warming, be it cooler or warmer, is something you can’t factor. We don’t have that kind of power. So as the global warming debate climate is shifting, the backlash has fallen on Australia and Europe and Japan. The consensus has broken down. The scientists and politicians in those countries are taking a second look and saying: Wait a minute, we don’t see any evidence here that man’s causing any of this, and we don’t see any evidence that there’s any warming going on.

Now, this is not being reported widely in the United States, but it’s happening in Australia and Japan and Europe. It’s happening there and the reason it’s not being reported here is because, of course, our star is Al Gore and the United Nations. The media goes out and they smear any dissenters. After listing scientists from all over the world who are skeptical of manmade global warming, Kimberley Strassel writes this: ‘The collapse of the ‘consensus’ has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon,’ and they’re deciding around the world they don’t have the desire and it makes no sense to put even more stress on their economies to reduce carbon when there’s no evidence that more carbon is harming anything, bottom line.

Our official climatologist here, Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, sent me a note last night. Let me find it in the stack here. It’s about fish. They’re finding that fish ears are growing because of carbon dioxide in the ocean. Remember all the horror stories that we have seen over the years about deformed frogs at birth and we have been told this is due to global warming and their ecology all out of whack. We find out that that’s not the case, and the left-wing BBC is nonetheless the source: ‘Scientists think they have resolved one of the most controversial environmental issues of the past decade: the curious case of the missing frogs’ legs. Around the world, frogs are found with missing or misshaped limbs, a striking deformity that many researchers believe is caused by chemical pollution.
However, tests on frogs and toads have revealed a more natural, benign cause. The deformed frogs are actually victims of the predatory habits of dragonfly nymphs, which eat the legs of tadpoles. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, researchers started getting reports of numerous wild frogs or toads being found with extra legs or arms, or with limbs that were partly formed or missing completely. The cause of these deformities soon became a hotly contested issue.’

It had to be caused by global warming, this and that. And people said, no, no, this is happening naturally. They were debunked and then called deniers and so forth. But they have now proven that these deformed frogs are simply nature taking its course. Nothing to do with man. Nothing to do with us. The cap-and-trade bill will probably tax dragonflies once they learn about this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One thing that you need to know about this test vote that the AP, the State-Run Media is talking about all over is the test vote is designed to make you think it’s all over. The test vote is designed to make you say, ‘Oh, it’s too late now! I can’t do anything about it.’ That’s not true. This thing is still up for grabs. I’ve got two different lists here of Republicans and Democrats on the fence. One’s from Red State and I don’t know where the other one’s from. But they’re a little different from one another. And there are too many names here to give out. Let’s go with the short list, the Republicans. Here are the last names of the Republicans on one of the list. Some of these names I don’t see on both lists so we’ll do the best we can here. But these are the Republicans that are on the fence about it — and there ought to be no Republicans ‘on the fence.’

This is nothing to do with saving anything. This is nothing to do with global warming. It is nothing to do with saving the climate or saving the planet or saving the polar bears. It is nothing to do with that. The problems that this legislation claims to address do not exist. Well, to the extent that some problems exist, they are not caused by us. Regulating our behavior, changing our behavior, limiting our freedom will not have any effect on whatever climate changes are or are not taking place out there. It’s just that simple. So we can argue about this. We can debate the merits of it all day long, but just in an ideological or philosophical way, this is a no-brainer, a non-starter. It is unnecessary. It is a pure power and money grab by the same people in Washington who have been grabbing power and money since Obama was inaugurated.

Now, according to the Washington Post: Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat from Minnesota — he’s the agricultural committee chairman — ‘said he was not sure what the offset program would look like: ‘The truth is, nobody knows for sure how this is going to work.” This is a Democrat chairman of the Ag Committee talking about cap and trade. Nobody knows how it’s going to work! Nobody’s read the full thing. Waxman has admitted he doesn’t know what’s all in it. All they know that’s in it that matters to them is tax increases, limitations on liberty and freedom and Washington regulating more and more of the behavior of the American public. That’s what’s attractive. Here are some Republican names on the short list that I’m told are on the fence. Buchanan in Florida. Gerlach in Pennsylvania. I forgot how to pronounce this rookie’s name C-a-o in Louisiana. Chow? Cho? I’m not sure how. Johnson in Illinois. Ehlers in Michigan. Kirk in Illinois. Frelinghuysen in New Jersey and Smith in New Jersey. Those are the Republicans on the short list of on the fence.

BREAK TRANSCIRPT

RUSH: I’m told the pronunciation of Mr. Cao’s name, the rookie — the guy that replaced Congressman William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana) — is ‘cow.’ Regardless, some people are asking, ‘Is there a number on this bill, Rush?’ Yes. H.R. 2454. Look, all you have to do is call your member of Congress. In fact, I’m now told there are a million and a half calls yesterday, not 17,000 to 20,000. Some of those million and a half calls yesterday were about healthcare as well, I’m sure. But regardless. H.R. 2454. The message is, ‘No, we won’t!’ It’s just very simple: ‘No, we won’t!’ Obama’s out there saying, ‘Yes, we can.’ The answer is, ‘No, you won’t. No, we won’t.’ Here’s more from the Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis: The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 ‘Fourth Assessment’ report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those [new] developments include a continued decline in global temperatures…’

And you know by virtue of your own life global temperatures are not rising. If you live in the Northeast, you live in Chicago, you live in the upper tier of states, you know you’re barely… You haven’t seen summer yet and it’s June 26! ‘Rush, you can’t use this anecdotal stuff.’ BS! Reality is reality. Global warming is not happening. The polar ice caps are not shrinking! At any rate, ‘developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense…’ We know that. We’ve had fewer hurricanes since that bad year of including Katrina. New findings are that ‘water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature.’ The point is that this old ‘consensus’ we’ve all heard about for all these years, ‘A consensus of scientists agree global warming is appearing…’

You can have no consensus in science. It’s not up for vote, it’s not up for an opinion. But whatever. That consensus was so-called preferred scientist software even falling apart now. ‘All of this demonstrates EPA should independently analyze the science, rather than just adopt the conclusions of outside organizations.’ Now, this is what the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes. That’s not the point. ‘EPA should independently…’ The science is irrelevant to the EPA! They don’t want to analyze the science. It’s not that they’re accepting science from outside sources; they’re accepting a political conclusion from outside sources. This whole issue is nothing but politics and it has been nothing but politics since I first heard of it in 1980. Back in 1984 — I’ve told you the story — I was watching This Week with David Brinkley and there was some global warming alarmist on named Oppenheimer. ‘We’ve got 20 years, George!’ he said to George Will.

‘We’ve got 20 years. If we don’t get in gear fast the oceans are going to rise.’ Twenty years? Well, 20 years was 2004. It’s 2009 and everything’s hunky-dory. All of this is just absurd. The EPA is not relying on science. Everything that Barack Obama has taken control of is pure politics. It is purely political, 100%. So to ask the EPA to look at different science? They just suppressed an internal report from one of their own employees. It says, ‘What you guys are doing is wrong. They said shut up. Don’t tell anybody about this,’ and they fired the guy. ‘Shut up. You’re not going to get out there.’ Anything that contradicts the political desire — and the political desire here is power, control, regulation of human behavior, the weakening of the US economy all for the benefit of the creation of more power for Obama and his minions. So, it’s down-to-the-wire time on all this. And again here’s the short list of Republican Congressmen and women who are on the fence on this the legislation H.R. 2454.

Buchanan in Florida. Gerlach in Pennsylvania. Cao in Louisiana. Johnson in Illinois. Ehlers in Michigan. Kirk in Illinois. Frelinghuysen in New Jersey. Smith in New Jersey. Now, there’s a lot of Democrats on the fence, way too many to name here. Heath Shuler from North Carolina is one. But he’s not on both lists. Here’s the short list of Democrats. Altmire from Pennsylvania. Bright from Alabama. Dahlkemper from Pennsylvania, Driehaus from Ohio. Ellsworth from Indiana. Kissell, North Carolina. Kratovil, Maryland. Paul Kanjorski, Pennsylvania. Minnick in Idaho. And Teague from New Mexico. That’s the short list of Democrats apparently on the fence. That test vote you’re hearing about, if you have heard about it, it was 217 to whatever it is. They need 218 to pass this. That’s the majority. The test vote’s designed to make it look like they’ve got it and to dispirit people from opposing it. That’s not the case.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know they call this the Waxman-Markey bill but they should call it the Madoff-Waxman-Markey bill. Put Madoff’s name in this bill because this bill is a con game. It promises what it cannot deliver.