Letter from the Flat Earth Society: Analyzing the Obama Administration’s War on the Middle Class

In a speech delivered yesterday at Georgetown University on global warming, President Obama sought to belittle his political opposition by describing us as “the flat Earth society.” This not-so-subtle labeling of those of us who haven’t jumped on board with his “cap and trade” agenda as simpletons is not only un-presidential, but outright implausible. The reference is to a historical inaccuracy, in which conservative Christians and people of faith have been portrayed as those who fought progress by denying the spherical nature of planet Earth. Factually, the exact opposite is true. Many of the scientists the West still reveres, who discovered the heliocentric nature of the solar system, the orbital pattern of planets, etc, were, in fact, Christian conservatives themselves. Thus, the notion that Christians were standing on the sidelines of history holding back the humanist-induced scientific revolution is completely inaccurate. As is the current presidential pontification that conservatives and people of faith are clinging to “guns, God and religion,” while ignoring the collapse of the Earth around us.

Barack Obama’s speech on “climate change” was nothing more than the same stale, scorched- earth political pandering he routinely preaches to his fringe Leftist base. By ticking off a litany of talking points probably compiled by GreenPeace, the President painted a picture of an American future where cities are flooded by rising oceans, children are inhaling lungs-full of polluted air and every living creature from sea turtles to spotted owls are dying right along with the planet. It was almost a scene-by-scene description of the planetary crack-up of Krypton in the new hit movie Man of Steel. The only thing missing was the scene where Superman’s mom is standing in the doorway when the planet spontaneously combusts beneath her. Such hysterical rhetoric belongs on the shelves of DC Comics, not in the District of Columbia.

Nevertheless, President Obama whipped-up false fear so that he could propose equally fantastical “solutions” to the made-up and / or exaggerated problems he described. All-in-all, the entirety of the speech was a fanciful, theatrical way for the President to propose unilaterally imposing the same “Cap and Trade” scheme his own party in Congress rejected in 2009 when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House. Under this so-called “cap and trade” strategy, Federal policies would be put in place that would necessarily cause electricity and fuel costs to skyrocket for American families. This would place an unimaginable and unnecessary burden on American families in general and middle-income families in particular. At a time of falling household wages, chronically high unemployment and stagnant economic growth, this is the last thing the American economy and American people need to face.

Nevertheless, in order to pander to a politically powerful constituency of the Democratic Party, the President is willing to butcher an already brutalized economy and middle class. The liberal ideological rationale (if non-ideological Americans can even conceive of such blind ideology) is that forced high energy costs will force Americans to abandon fossil fuel engines (powering about 98% of our cars) and traditional modes of home and office electricity, in order to replace them with “green” energy sources such as solar power and electric cars. Cash-strapped American households can hardly afford to replace the nation’s entire energy infrastructure overnight, particularly when the proposed infrastructure has proven to be so unreliable and scarcely available. If the President gets his way on this executive-order imposed “Cap and Trade” scheme, it will revisit the economic environment of 2008 on 2013 America. We simply cannot afford to go backward under the auspices of pseudo-science that ignores the reality that the Earth has been on a ten plus year cooling trend.

Finally, beyond what such a flurry of environmentalist fanatic-inspired executive orders would do to our economy and standard of living, it will do severe damage to the separation of powers structure under our Constitution. If Presidents set precedent of putting in place policies by executive order that Congress has previously rejected, it is the end of the Republic as we know it. If Presidents routinely end-run Congress and implement an agenda the people’s representatives have explicitly rejected, it is the rise of an Imperial Presidency that would make even Richard Nixon nervous.

Congress must exercise is constitutional checks on the presidency and stop this end-run around its legitimate legislative authority. I call on members of Congress to move to file a lawsuit against the President if these executive orders are issued, and invoke the review of the courts as well as Congress into this unprecedented disregard for the rule of law.

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