This week the Senate is voting on overturning the costly Utility MACT rules that will drive up the cost of electricity and ruin the coal industry. Last week Phil Kerpen highlighted how these rules will hit us in our wallets, and noted that Republican Senator Lamar Alexander may vote with the Democrats on this.

As I wrote here on Fox News Opinion, the states in the Eastern region are headed for a significant spike in electricity prices thanks to Obama’s disastrous regulations, foremost among them Utility MACT.  The Midwest, even more heavily reliant on coal-fired power plants, will be hit even harder.  A reprieve could come in the form of Senator Jim Inhofe’s S.J. Res 37, which would overturn Obama’s most expensive anti-coal regulations.

Indeed, with the vote on the Inhofe Resolution coming any day, Democrats are deeply concerned that a centerpiece of President Obama’s regulatory War on Coal is about to go down in flames.  The only apparent way Democrats can prevent that outcome is by having multiple vulnerable in-cycle Democrats join Obama’s War on Coal, against their own political interests.

The only Senate Republican who has publicly sided with Obama in support of the disastrous Utility MACT regulation that would cripple coal-fired power plants and therefore imperil our fragile economic recovery is Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, and he has been exposed to his constituents in a hard-hitting TV ad being run by my group, American Commitment.

The outcome of the vote, which is not subject to filibuster, is on a razor’s edge.  But Senator Alexander, who is under the mistaken impression that this economically devastating regulation will make his mountain retreat slightly more picturesque, refuses to back down. (Read More)

The EPA’s war on coal is already having an effect, and Utility MACT will only make things worse.

It’s no coincidence that as the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory mountain grows, coal production in the Appalachian region – including eastern Kentucky – diminishes. Mines close and permits to open new mines – along with the new jobs and economic opportunity that would be created – are held hostage by ideological environmental fanatics, most of whom probably don’t even know how to put a miner’s hat on their largely empty heads.

Groups like Beyond Coal celebrate the fact that 110 out of 522 Appalachian coal-fired power plants have closed. These radical left-wing zealots actually cheer the hardship that results, including the fact that these plant shutdowns equate to a loss of 13 percent of all coal-based electric capacity in the nation. (Read More)

Some Democrats are already planning to vote for Inhofe’s resolution, because they understand what the EPA is doing to the economy. Be sure to contact your Senators and ask them to vote for SJ 37. The economy is bad enough as it is, do we really need to make it worse? Good grief.