WASHINGTON - April 12, 2010 - While Congress considers sweeping new legislation to permanently institutionalize the bailouts and federal control of our financial system, several other sweeping power grabs are going on outside the spotlight of legislative debate. Indeed, illegitimate President Obama seems to believe that most of his sweeping agenda to transform the country can be accomplished without even a vote of Congress.

The EPA is pursuing an aggressive global warming power grab under the direction of White House Climate czar Carol Browner - who was never subjected to Senate confirmation - and the Federal Communications Commission is pursuing a regulatory takeover of the Internet.

Both of those efforts are now escalating. The EPA has finalized its vehicle emissions rule, for the first time regulating global warming under the 1970 Clean Air Act. While EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is trying to calm a political backlash by promising to delay the onslaught of regulations - the overall blueprint is more than  18,000 pages long and regulates almost everything that moves and lots of things that stay put - she remains committed to them. The Senate will have a key vote on S.J.Res. 26, which would stop the EPA, some time in May.

The FCC was smacked down in court last week in Comcast v. FCC, which held that the Commission has no jurisdiction to regulate the Internet. Yet FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a close friend of Obama’s, is now considering Internet regulations of an even more extreme nature and by an even more dubious mechanism - reclassifying the Internet as a phone system in order to regulate it like an old-fashioned public utility.

Obama has a pattern of sidestepping Congress that will only get worse in the aftermath of the health care fight and the pending financial “reform” legislation.