J's Cafe Nette

Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has done something not very often done in the Senate. She has called for a vote and passed a bill through her committee without any members of the minority party present.

Conservatives have been calling this a Cap and Tax bill or Cap and Spend bill. Republicans on the committee boycotted the hearings until they could get an analysis of the bill from the EPA, thinking by not having at least two members of the minority party present the vote could not take place.

Not in this Congress. No rules are the rule.

The bill would require cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent over the next decade from 2005 levels. But Republicans warned the bill would leave consumers with higher energy bills.

“This would be the largest tax increase in the history of America,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., one of the seven committee Republicans, told Fox News. “I can only conclude that they don’t want the public to know how much money this thing is going to cost.”

Inhofe, who said the committee typically needs two minority members present to advance a bill to the floor, called the vote Thursday “unprecedented.”

One Democrat, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., voted against the bill. Ten Democrats voted for it.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the committee, applauded the vote in a written statement Thursday.

“We are pleased that despite the Republican boycott, we have been able to move the bill,” she said.

She defended the decision not to seek an EPA analysis, calling such a study “duplicative and a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gone from amusement to anger to apathy and back to furious anger with the way the Democrats are running this government of ours and the way they are destroying our country and the people who live here.

How much more can they squeeze from the taxpayers? China already owns this country and they certainly won’t contain their greenhouse emissions.

If it were within my power, I’d call for special elections of the entire Congress tomorrow. Make it Saturday so everyone can have an opportunity to vote. We do still have some people working, don’t we?

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