Deliberation in Washington is dead. We don't have legislators. We have lemmings. We don't have debates. We have high-speed hysteria sessions. After ramming through stimulus legislation that no one read and bailout bills that no one understood, Congress is now poised to stuff down taxpayers' throats a deficit-exploding $3.5 trillion budget that enshrines the largest tax increase in American history.

Welcome to the cap-and-trade crap sandwich.

The Democrats want to rig the game so you don't have time to figure out this latest act of collective thievery before it's perpetrated. They have been colluding on a plan to circumvent the Senate's 60-vote threshold and amendment process by attaching their massive green tax scheme to a special budget legislative maneuver ("budget reconciliation" in the parlance of the Washington sausage-makers). No less than Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd criticized this short-circuiting of debate as an "outrage that must be resisted" and "an undemocratic disservice to our people." But the eco-zealots on the Hill seem hell-bent on telling Americans to shut up and swallow.

On the Senate floor Tuesday, Republicans valiantly tried to stop the cap-and-trade bullet train -- only to be met with histrionic entreaties from the likes of Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dick Durbin shrieking about floods, dinosaurs and The Children. Boxer and Durbin indignantly accused GOP senators of "fear-mongering" over the costs of radical greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Then, without missing a beat, the Democrats returned to their wild predictions of the earth fizzling up and their grandchildren perishing like the prehistoric creatures who once roamed our doomed planet.

GOP Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and John Thune of South Dakota pushed back. President Obama, the Republicans noted, said last week that the cap-and-trade component of his budget is "nonnegotiable." This global warming reduction proposal amounts to an unprecedented national energy tax on every man, woman and child. Every household. Every business. Continued...