OVERREACH: Biden forces government to tackle ‘environmental justice’

In an absurd case of government overreach, President Joe Biden signed an executive order last week compelling the federal government to embrace his “environmental justice agenda.”

“President Biden and Vice President Harris believe that every person has a right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a healthy community – now and into the future,” explained a White House press release last Friday. “During his first week in office, President Biden launched the most ambitious environmental justice agenda in our nation’s history. To continue delivering on that vision, today the President will sign an executive order further embedding environmental justice into the work of federal agencies to achieve real, measurable progress that communities can count on.”

“The Executive Order is part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s whole-of-government effort to confront longstanding environmental injustices and inequities,” the press release continues.  “For far too long, communities across our country have faced persistent environmental injustice through toxic pollution, underinvestment in infrastructure and critical services, and other disproportionate environmental harms often due to a legacy of racial discrimination including redlining. These communities with environmental justice concerns face even greater burdens due to climate change.”

Biden never bothers to explain whether he has the authority to barge into our communities in such glorious fashion because, of course, he does not. His boldfaced government intrusion, in the name of something as vague as “environmental justice,” lacks even any semblance of constitutionality and is hardly justified.

He also employs dangerous rhetoric, inventing new “rights” out of thin air. Language such as “every person has a right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a healthy community” may sound innocent enough, but is indicative of a seismic shift—engendered by progressives—in how Americans think about rights.

It goes without saying that our founding documents do not guarantee or even allude to the so-called right to live in a “healthy community.” Healthy communities would be preferable, even from the Founders’ perspectives, of course. But the federal government cannot guarantee such a privilege will be afforded to every American.

It is, in fact, in the best interest of the American people that Washington stay out of the business of making all communities “healthy.” To do so on the federal level would require enormous government power. Freedom and federalism would not be possible in such a top-down system.

Nevertheless, Biden goes to the extreme of claiming that his executive order will “revitalize our nation’s commitment to environmental justice for all [lowercased from original].”

Sorry, Joe. Last I checked, our nation never made any such commitment.

What makes Biden’s government dictum so dangerous is not merely that environmental justice is an absurd pretense for expanding government power but that he has conflated negative rights (“freedoms from…”) with positive rights (“freedoms to…).

The Founders believed that all rights came from God, not government. Therefore, all the government could do was recognize, protect, and ensure the free practice of preexisting rights. The laws of nature and nature’s God entitled us to these rights, the Founders believed; government dare not infringe.

Since the Progressive Era, government’s role has gradually shifted from protecting rights to handing them out, putting itself in the place of God. The danger inherent in this approach is that if government can give rights, government can also take them away.

For this reason, we ought to be wary of anyone in the government who promises us new “rights.” Washington is out of control; the administrative state is hell-bent on controlling every aspect of our lives. It’s time to put the federal government back inside its constitutional box, and the only way we can do it is through an Article V convention.

To support this constitutional solution as big as the problem, sign the Convention of States petition below!