Motus Mentis

I don’t often link to WSJ editorials, but their comment here on President Obama’s latest regulatory audacity is worth reading.

The gist: the States should simply refuse to be bullied in this way. The WSJ’s idea is that the Court will, rightly, strike this thing down as a usurpation of the law-making power of Congress — but that is hardly a given, and in Constitutional terms we have come to a mighty sorry pass when the making of law is a tug-of-war between the Executive and the Judiciary. Nevertheless, somebody needs to stand up to this aggression — and for now it is the States that will have to draw the line.

This foolish and hubristic war on carbon-based energy — a religious gesture that Mark Levin has likened, with stinging accuracy, to a “rain dance” — is not only a political and economic outrage, but an ethical one one as well. On that score I refer you to Alex Epstein’s book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. And to understand how this latest mission-from-God is simply the newest link in an unbroken, centuries-old chain of New England Protestant zealotry, now in a modern, ostensibly secular, form, you should read The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, by George McKenna. (Or perhaps you should read this.)