Another Scheme To Enlarge An Already Bloated Federal Government

If Democrats have their way, America will eventually form a Civilian Climate Corps that will hire and train people to save Earth from overheating. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from the party that is obsessed with being an unchallengeable ruling class rather than a participant in our republican style of government.

Last week, House and Senate Democrats celebrated “the newfound momentum behind establishing a formal successor to the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal-era initiative that put people to work building parks, paving roads and planting trees,” E&E News reported.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, promised to use the “power” of his position “to ensure that the Civilian Climate Corps will be included in the reconciliation package, and I will fight to get the biggest boldest CCC possible.”

As usual, the Democrats are having a mind-racing fever dream. In this one they are consumed by visions of spending billions of dollars that aren’t theirs, and sending out swarms of climate zealots to harass, lecture, and hector Americans over their use of fossil fuels. They’re likely seeing themselves solidifying a voter bloc so grateful for the party’s largess, and so indoctrinated by its growing socialist ideology, that it will help elect Democrats for generations. Never underestimate how power hungry the party is, nor how determined the progressive wing that’s driving its agenda is to transform the U.S. by perpetually adding layers of government control.

Simply put, the Democrats are looking to equip 1.5 million shock troops to enforce the Green New Deal.

Climate Corps advocates believe their agenda has a built-in appeal because it’s pulled right from the heart of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. But rather than establishing credibility, a comparison with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s governing should alert Americans to its inherent flaws. The New Deal was not a savior from the Great Depression but instead a constant piling up of government programs and private-sector interventions that extended the misery.

“Poor people,” says Cato Institute fellow Jim Powell, “were principal victims of the New Deal,” which “was substantially financed by the middle class and poor people.” Funding FDR’s programs destroyed jobs, and held back economic growth. As our colleague Stephen Moore has written, “after seven years of New Deal-era explosions in federal debt and spending, the U.S. economy was still flat on its back … by 1940, unemployment still averaged 14.6%,” lower than the rate (23.6%) when Roosevelt was elected, but higher than it was three years earlier when it was 14.3%. 

But the Democrats love the New Deal because it permanently expanded the size of government. It’s a well of poison water they can go back to again and again.

Which of course explains why establishing a Civilian Climate Corps is so important to them: They can harness the alarmists’ fanaticism and ride it to ever greater political power. Dissenters and doubters will be marginalized, and removed from the political process, leaving the Democrats with fewer opponents to slow their march.

Think again of the New Deal, described in 1933 in the New York Times Magazine as an era in which not only did the president “possess more authority than any of his predecessors,” but also presided “over a government that has more control over more private activities than any other that has ever existed in the United States.” 

This was of course peddled as a positive development. It was anything but. The same can be said for the new CCC. It will be anything but a guardian of the climate – just another scheme to enlarge a government that the Democrats hope to control in perpetuity.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board