Oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them.  The reason why Republicans won control over so many state legislatures was because it was one way for voters to protest against Obama and his works.  To retain what has been newly won, those same Republicans will have to win the trust of their electorates by being good at governing.  In the meantime, they have a mandate and a duty to be all things anti-Obama, all the time.  That is what the voters voted for, no matter the inherent goodness of the Republicans who won.  If they do what the voters want, they might be given another chance at the next election.

For his part, Obama is well aware of the will of the electorate but will carry on regardless.  The Obama regime has stated that “[t]he president will use his executive action to take some additional steps” on global warming.  So global warming is a good place to start for Republican state legislatures to push back against the darkness.  It will be as easy as falling off a log.  All they have to do is commission reports on the science of global warming, climate change, or whatever they want to call it.  The results will be preordained by the choice of the people chosen to write the reports. 

The reports will state that, yes, the planet has warmed, and that was due to the highest solar activity in 8,000 years.  They will also state that carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas and that the little bit of greenhouse-based temperature rise from here will be lost in the noise of the climate system.  They might go on to say that solar activity is falling away and that it might be prudent to prepare for solar-driven cooling in the decades to come.

To date, there has been no government-sanctioned report anywhere on the planet that has not toed the leftist line on global warming.  And that is what the lefties are deathly afraid of.  On a subject like climate, one government report is as good as any other government’s report.  A forty-page report from the State of Texas would have as much weight as 1,400 pages from the IPCC.  Once the report from Texas, or any other state, is out, promoters of the global warming hysteria won’t be able to represent their voodoo science as infallible, as per this cringe-worthy TV ad in the Florida gubernatorial campaign.  Reports from the states saying that global warming is nonsense will send the EPA into apoplexy. 

It doesn’t matter what Obama’s motivations are in wanting to crush and distort the U.S. economy through his war on coal, but let’s discuss them anyway.   It is a peculiar form of self-loathing if he thinks of himself as an American in the first instance, or a loathing for Americans if he doesn’t.  He wants Americans to be poorer, less happy, and less secure.  He doesn’t have lofty ideals of wanting to pass on the best possible world to the generations to follow; it is loathing and contempt all the way down.  And the EPA is one of his instruments in that loathing.

Some newly elected Republicans might be having thoughts of settling in and redecorating their offices.  Leave those thoughts to the second term.  Your first duty is to create mischief and mayhem for the Obama regime.  The biggest bang for your buck in doing that will be to commission reports on climate.  Get to it.  Have them lined up before you are sworn in.

David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014).  He has lectured on climate in both U.S. Senate and congressional hearing rooms.