We've all heard by now that President Trump is proposing to take away "California's power to set its own vehicle tailpipe emissions standards, escalating an environmental dispute that has trapped auto makers in the middle."
This move by Trump is reported to be in conjunction with a rollback of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards.
To date, all of California emission standards restrictions eclipse those of the federal government.
If you are unfamiliar, Corporate Average Fuel Economy(CAFE) Standards are regulations, first enacted by the United States Congress in 1975, after the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo, to improve the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks (trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles) produced for sale in the United States.
It was sold as new "efficiency" standards that would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It didn't work out that way, but hey, at least we got more bureaucracy and government control out it.
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In other words, it was a big-government, knee-jerk reaction that became a permanent "solution" to a temporary problem. The embargo problem subsided, oil production and delivery normalized after a while, but the mandates remain – forever – adding whole new bureaucratic agencies where none existed prior, mountains of additional paperwork and billions of dollars in cost.
However, by the time the national CAFE standards were enacted, California had already passed state laws covering a myriad of air pollution "concerns."
So it was decided that as long California's standards were at least as strict as the federal mandates, Congress would grant continuous waivers for California to further crack down on evil automakers and other polluters. And California has been doing this since the 1960s, long before CAFE standards even existed, and even before the passage of the original 1963 federal Clean Air Act.
In fact the federal government, in 1968, used California standards as the model for the first national vehicle emissions standards.
"In a series of Twitter posts, Mr. Trump said the uniformity will create jobs and safer cars."
To this, a well-known radio host and constitutional scholar for whom I have immense respect (and will not mention by name) said something the other day regarding the president's proposed revocation of California's special auto emissions standards carve-out.
The host said he heard nothing but excuses for the California waivers, with others saying that Ronald Reagan was the one who got the waivers for his state, as he was governor from 1967 to 1975. This is supposed to make the waivers palatable because conservatives and Republicans believe Reagan could do no wrong. This was the implication.
But the host says, "Reagan would agree with what Trump is doing – because Reagan got the waiver, but he never thought a clown like Gavin Newsom would be the governor [of California], or a clown like Barack Obama would be president of the United States. So Trump isn't doing anything that contradicts the Reagan philosophy on governing."
I rarely disagree with this host – he's smarter than I'll ever be, but I have to on this point.
As great as Ronald Reagan was, and as good as Trump has been so far, this one paragraph by the host sums up, in my mind, the difference between even our greatest modern leaders and our Founding Fathers. The founders had a vision and forethought very few of us seem to possess today.
There is a movie that came out in 1997 called "Contact," starring Jodie Foster. Foster was chosen for an unknown mission to space. As they are preparing her for the journey, a man steps forward and shows her a single pill in a vial. It's a fast-acting suicide pill. He explains that there are a thousand reasons they can think of to issue the pill to all astronauts, but it's really for the one reason they can't imagine.
This is what sets the founders apart from even our greatest modern politicians. It's why the Constitution and Bill of Rights exists. Both were written to effectively and preemptively rein in the federal government, defining specific functions for each branch of government. If it isn't defined as a specific function of the federal government, the function is "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" (10th Amendment).
And nowhere in the Constitution is there a clause stating that the feds can revoke California's power to set its own vehicle tailpipe emissions standards. We may not like it; I don't – but the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and must be followed, like it or not.
Our founders crafted these documents for the same reason Foster was issued the pill – not for the thousand reasons they could think of, but for the few or the one they couldn't at the time imagine – like Gavin Newsom or Barack Obama.