By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
On Wednesday, December 6, 2023, the United States House of Representatives passed the CARS Act, which would defend American auto manufacturers, workers, and consumers from an unconstitutionally over-regulatory U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the many other related federal efforts to effectively ban normal petroleum-powered vehicles.
Passing the House isn’t enough, of course. Like any other bill, it must pass the U.S. Senate and be signed into law – or override a veto – in order to go into effect.
But it’s still worthwhile because bills like this one force politicians to go on the record, providing a legitimate campaign issue for the next race. You can’t say your opponent is a tool of the wacko green Left if your opponent hasn’t had to cast any votes that make it clear.
The CARS Act is a rational, common-sense piece of legislation that would rein in the bureaucrats and free our manufacturers to make the vehicles that consumers want to buy. Only a nut – or a puppet of the global green movement – would oppose it.
And it’s more than that, too.
The CARS Act essentially calls out the Left for more than hypocrisy. It calls them out for a multitude of wrongs.
For example, it reminds the public that this government is tyrannical.
The Biden-Harris regime has no moral right try to force people into vehicles that they can’t afford and don’t want – but still they try, every day, through executive orders and EPA rule-making, which only Congress can stop.
But more than that, it reminds the public that this government is illegal. Even if they want to issue such edicts, the Biden-Harris regime simply doesn’t have the legal authority to issue them, and the EPA was never given the power to regulate that way.
This rampant unconstitutionality is a problem across the entire federal bureaucracy — an archipelago of departments and agencies, created by Congress, which exceed their chartered authority every day, making rules they have no legal authority to make. It’s long past time for Congress to start enforcing our clear, constitutional limits on the agencies that past Congresses, and often thoughtlessly created.
Many in our government have accepted a ridiculous theory – that Carbon Dioxide, the building block of virtually all earthly plant life, is somehow lethal to humanity – and they have allowed this cultish belief to drive such outlandish policies as sabotaging America’s transportation, energy, and manufacturing sectors. Virtually our entire economy runs on petroleum, natural gas, and coal; in limiting such resources, these madmen have the very lifeblood of the economy in their sights.
The CARS Act also reminds us of a particularly overwhelming package of individual hypocrisies about the electric vehicle industry itself, like the fact that EVs themselves use up more energy in their manufacture than traditional internal combustion engine powered vehicles do, not to mention more than they could ever “save.”
And the fact that EVs are themselves virtually made of petroleum, since there’s so much plastic, polyester, polyethylene, synthetic rubber, and so many other petroleum derivatives in the makeup of these vehicles that they could not exist without petroleum and a thriving petrochemical industry.
Then there’s the undeniable fact that the mining and production of lithium and cobalt for these vehicles relies on a combination of forced labor and awful working conditions that no true, honest environmentalist, conservationist, or labor activist could ever endorse.
And another fact? We have states already suffering rampant blackouts today, because the existing electric grid can’t support our current needs. Imagine tens of millions more cars also trying to draw on that same grid. Unless we replace these fool wind farms and solar farms with nuclear power plants, and soon, there’s no way our country could support broad use of electric vehicles anyway.
Then there’s the prohibitive cost when subsidies are removed, the unacceptable charging times, the limited driving range, and the growing likelihood of eventual un-insurability of these firetraps.
Electric vehicles do have their good points; the electric vehicle is a niche vehicle with wonderful positives for people in a very narrow area of needs.
But the idea of switching over full-scale production from internal combustion engines (ICEs) to these things entirely, anytime soon, is insane, and it would be detrimental for more than just the auto industry.
The CARS Act gives politicians the opportunity to go on record acknowledging this, or, conversely, to clearly go on record proclaiming their allegiance to this economically and societally destructive fancy.
Electric Vehicles aren’t alone. Congress needs to take exactly this kind of action on a host of issues.
This government mandates untested drugs; bans proven engines; forbids the installation of cost-efficient furnaces and stoves that work. It bans schools from limiting women’s sports to female competitors. This government has no right to do any of the above, but it does so anyway.
A nation founded on the Scottish Enlightenment’s respect for human liberty has been corrupted; we are now ruled by a government that tells us what we can do, what we can buy, how our lives must be managed.
This government tells our manufacturers what products to make and denies them the choice to make others. It hires devious bureaucrats specifically to write regulations that knowingly break their constitutional limits, then floods the judiciary with corrupt judges to fight off proper constitutional challenges.
The CARS Act is good. It does the right thing.
Now let’s see a dozen more such efforts – on healthcare, on manufacturing, on banking, on energy production, on foreign aid and other foreign policy.
This House can pass a dozen bills that side with the American public against the Leftist swamp.
And then we will have the clear choice we need, to present to the electorate a year from now. The American voter needs that clear choice. The American experiment in limited government needs to be reacquainted with these limits.
The world needs America to be American, again.
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One, Two, and Three, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
