Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican member of the Budget Committee, says President Obama’s promise to act without congressional authorization on climate change and transitioning America to “sustainable” energy sources “dangerous to democracy.”
“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy,” Obama said in his State of the Union address.
“I was highly concerned about that. This idea is very dangerous to democracy. Congress will not pass any far reaching climate change bill. It’s failed time and again because the American people do not want it but the president and his EPA and other regulatory agencies are shoving the envelope further than we’ve ever seen before,” Sessions told The Daily Caller in a video interview on Capitol Hill.
“They just issue regulations that amount to statutory changes in many instances and that is going to allow perhaps to change the law and alter our economic policy to advance theory of global warming. So, this is not what we voted for and to stop it, either it’s so clear a court would overturn it, or you would need to pass a law.”
Sessions said it would be hard to stop Obama’s executive actions by passing a law since Democrats control the Senate.
“It’s really an unusual expansion of an executive power to a degree that I think is quite dangerous,” he said Tuesday evening.
The cap-and-trade bill, which was designed to reduce total carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, passed in the Democratic-controlled House in 2009 but it was defeated in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Obama also suggested Superstorm Sandy was a result of climate change in his State of the Union address.
“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late,” Obama said.
Sessions said he was “baffled” by the president’s comments.
“The people who said that it just baffled me. I mean, we’ve had hurricanes for years throughout America and we’ve not had a greater number of them in recent years than we’ve had before,” Sessions said.