Ann Carlson, who is serving as acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a Transportation Department subagency, seems to have gotten herself into a pickle.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has introduced an amendment to have her salary stripped, but that is only one aspect of the problems she now faces.
Cruz has been opposed to this nomination from the outset, even trying to get a vote in the Senate to defund the taxpayer salary that Carlson is collecting.
Carlson remains the shot caller at the NHTSA, even though her appointment as "acting" violated the law (her nomination has since been pulled by Biden).
Cruz stated:
"President Biden's illegal appointment of Ann Carlson, who was effectively rejected by the Senate due to concerns about her extreme agenda and radical record, will only yield more mandates, higher costs for families and a less vibrant economy."
We should also note the fact she is serving in an "acting" role is illegal, per the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which prohibits:
"Any person who has been nominated to fill any vacant office from performing that office's duties in an acting capacity."
After the Republican Commerce Committee conducted an investigation into Carlson, it found that she had helped coordinate litigation against fossil fuel companies by the law firm Sher Edling.
This firm has filed at least a dozen climate nuisance lawsuits on behalf of different cities, counties, and states.
Tom Jones, the president of the right-leaning watchdog group American Accountability Foundation, stated:
"These revelations make it clear that Ann Carlson is utterly unsuited for a job in government. Putting a Leftist swamp creature like her in charge of regulating vehicles in America, even after she was rejected by the Senate, is a serious scandal that Joe Biden needs to answer for. Carlson has spent her career making life harder for regular Americans with her arbitrary and delusional campaign to eradicate gasoline powered cars.
"As we've just seen, even electric vehicles' biggest boosters at Ford have realized that this technology is not a realistic alternative to gasoline cars. But thanks to Joe Biden she has the power to impose her extremist green ideology on all of us, attempting to become a Soviet style central planner for American cars."
So, this seems to be about the norm for the Biden administration these days.
Biden has sidestepped rules and laws regarding appointments since he got the keys to the White House, and this is just one more example.
It is another example of how Biden loads his administration with activists from the far left.
From my viewpoint, it just seems like Biden is paying off all the people who put him in office by giving these activists direct access to the administration by putting one of their own in key positions.
