Europe's ruling class would rather let their own citizens drop dead from heat than admit their green energy religion has failed — and the same breed of unaccountable bureaucrat is working to impose that philosophy on Americans through the administrative state.
The pictures out of Western Europe this past week told the story. A historic heat wave rolled across the continent, and the people who built a civilization on the promise of comfort and progress had neither. Not because the technology doesn't exist, but because their leaders decided it shouldn't.
In France, environment minister Monique Barbut declared herself "horrified" that citizens coping with dangerous heat might want air conditioning, citing climate change — even as her own ministry stays comfortably cooled, according to Italian journalist Leonardo Panetta. In Düsseldorf, Germany, the cardiac unit of a university hospital built just 15 years ago hit 38 degrees Celsius — 100.4 Fahrenheit. Heart surgery patients sweltered while relatives were asked to bring ice packs from home and staff wore "cooling vests," HotAir reported. The building has no central air. The reason isn't cost or oversight. It's ideology.
HotAir framed the episode as Europe's "existential threat is themselves" — a continent so committed to green orthodoxy that it punishes its own vulnerable rather than question the dogma. The Daily Caller, covering a different front of the same war, reported on the Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which struck down 90 years of precedent shielding independent agencies from presidential oversight. The Court ruled the President has full authority to remove commissioners with or without cause.
The connective tissue is unaccountable power. Europe's Brahmins in Brussels and America's administrative state both operate on the same premise: the people are not to be trusted with choices, and the experts know best. Woodrow Wilson called the Constitution a "bygone device" and built a bureaucracy to replace it, as the Daily Caller noted. The result has been a permanent class of federal employees who "cannot be fired, who resist presidents they oppose, and who entrench themselves under those who expand government."
Ordinary Americans pay the tab. Michelle Cochran spent seven years fighting an SEC administrative judge before the agency surrendered. George Jarkesy spent fourteen years before the Court ruled he had a right to a jury trial. The government's resources are limitless. Most Americans' are not.
Europe's green mandates and America's administrative state share the same DNA: insulated elites imposing costs on citizens who never consented. The Supreme Court just took a hammer to one pillar. The question is whether anyone will take a hammer to the other before American hospitals start looking like Düsseldorf.
