It’s difficult to say which is more astonishing: President Obama’s willingness to skip Congress and adjust the crown that he imagines himself to wear or the news media’s lack of interest in calling him on it.

That’s from a general point of view; from a pragmatic point of view, neither is very astonishing, considering that they both see themselves as left-wing activists.  The president wouldn’t attempt such things as creating new energy law without bothering with our elected legislature if he didn’t expect the news media to cover for him, and the news media wouldn’t ignore it if the partisans and ideologues who compose it didn’t support the Democrat party or disagreed the policy.

But any American with even a passing education in civics should read the following and ask, “Umm, where does he get the authority to do that?”

Touting the plan at a White House ceremony, Obama described his unprecedented carbon dioxide limits as the biggest step ever taken by the United States on climate change. On that point, at least, his opponents agreed. They denounced his proposal as egregious federal overreach that would send power prices surging, and vowed lawsuits and legislation to try to stop it.

The federal overreach isn’t even half of the problem.  Even if the federal government had the Constitutional authority to impose such a policy on the states, how in the world does the president, acting unilaterally through a regulatory agency, have the authority to make “the biggest step ever taken by the United States on climate change”?  This ought to be the stuff of impeachment and revolution, because it means we simply do not have a federalist, Constitutional, representative democracy.

We still get to elect the president… for now and discounting the realities of media bias, voter fraud, and immigration policy designed to counteract the American electorate… but this is not how our system is supposed to operate.

One suspects, frankly, that the move (indeed, the entire climate change hysteria) is primarily intended as a ruse to eliminate the rights of the people to control their own government and, therefore, their own lives.  As Betsy McCaughey notes in The American Spectator, the amount of actual improvement in climate change results (even assuming the questionable models are correct) is minuscule.

If the American people don’t wake up and see through this very soon, we deserve the next step in this takeover of our country.