While everyone is concerned about the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, something much more ominous just happened: the United States ceased to be a representative republic.

It happened on Thursday when the Senate voted to abdicate its central powers to the executive branch. Not that it was billed in such momentous terms. In the news, it was reported merely as the failure of the Murkowski Resolution.

What did the Murkowski Resolution say? It said that "Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to the endangerment finding and the cause or contribute findings for greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act and that such rule shall have no force or effect."

This was proposed as a response to the EPA's recent decree (enabled by a disastrous 2007 Supreme Court ruling) which declared that carbon dioxide is a dangerous "pollutant" that will be regulated and restricted by the EPA under 1990's Clean Air Act. In effect, the EPA was saying that congressional debate over "cap and trade" and other restriction on carbon dioxide are irrelevant—that the agency can bypass Congress and regulate CO2 on its own authority. The Murkowski Resolution was an attempt to explicitly take that authority away from an executive agency and reclaim it for the legislative branch of government.

Note what this vote was not about. The Senate did not actually vote on whether or not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The debate in the Senate was not about what form those regulations should take, how strict they should be, or even whether the science behind those regulations has been discredited by Climategate. The vote was simply over who is in charge: the legislative branch of government, or the executive. As the bill's chief sponsor, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, argued: "Politically accountable members of the House and Senate, not unelected bureaucrats, must develop our nation's energy and climate policies."

Or to put it simply, legislation should be made by legislators.

In our system of government—or rather, in our former system of government—there was a division of power between the legislature and the executive. The legislators, who answer to the people directly, had the power to write the laws, to decide exactly what should be controlled by government and how, and the job of the executive was to implement those laws. Our nation's Founders knew that if the executive branch could both write the laws and enforce them, there would be virtually no limits on its power. They knew that a system in which all power is concentrated in one institution—an institution that is not composed of the representatives of the people—is a form of dictatorship.

That is precisely what we now have, if the EPA can write its own rules on carbon dioxide.

It's important to grasp how enormous the authority is that has now been ceded to the executive branch. Carbon dioxide is a basic, ineradicable byproduct of the burning of our cheapest, most reliable, most abundant fuels: oil, coal, and natural gas. And the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate all sources that produce more than 250 tons of a "pollutant" each year. When it comes to carbon dioxide, that is a much smaller amount than you may think. This is a net so fine that it would empower the EPA to regulate small office buildings, restaurants, tens of thousands of small businesses, even some larger private homes.

And that's not all. The original Supreme Court ruling was in response to a lawsuit by environmentalists who were attempting to force the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emission from automobiles by raising the federal gas mileage requirements—which the EPA has already done. Now the EPA is moving on to the regulation of "large source" emitters such as power plants. It has decided, for now, not to regulate smaller sources—but those businesses keep operating at the pleasure of the EPA, which can tighten the noose at any time.

And it will tighten the noose. Motivated by the phantom fear of "global warming," the administration has set a target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 15% by 2020 and by a stunning 83% by 2050. As Jack Wakeland sums it up, a 15% reduction amounts to an "EU-style low-growth economy." An 83% reduction—a constriction of the overwhelming majority of the fuel that powers our civilization—requires such a pervasive and crushing control over the economy that it amounts to a "Maoist crash into de-industrialization, totalitarian dictatorship, barbarism, and mass death."

This is the power that Congress has just relinquished to the executive branch. Carbon dioxide is such a ubiquitous, central product of human economic activity that the ability to regulate it is the ability to regulate virtually everything. The EPA has been handed the power to centrally plan the entire economy, and to plan its collapse.

In granting this power to the EPA, the Senate has voted for its suicide—and ours.

Students of history know that in a republic, liberty is very rarely seized; it is usually surrendered. And so we find that this last-ditch attempt by the Senate to keep its constitutional authority was defeated by a vote of 53-47. Every one of the 53 senators who voted for the dissolution of representative government was from the party that calls itself "Democratic."

This is not as ironic as it may seem. It is, in fact, the culmination of a century-long trend in which advocates of a "democracy" with unlimited powers have found that their ability to act is encumbered by the very process of representative government itself. Every initiative gets bogged down in legislative wrangling, the advocacy of "special interests" (i.e., anyone who gets in the way of your faction), and the network of checks and balances created by the Constitution. So there usually comes a point where unlimited "democracy" liquidates itself by seeking out a dictator who supposedly represents the "will of the people" and will sweep aside all barriers to it.

In Europe, the figure invested with the will of the people has been a Napoleon or a Hitler; in today's world, look to demagogic strongmen like Hugo Chavez. But America's style is a little more bland. The dictators we appoint to rule over us are grey little bureaucrats. For more than a century, Congress has progressively given away its power to executive-branch regulatory agencies. Consider the health care bill, for example, which created an enormous number of regulatory provisions that are not specified in the bill but are instead left for a regulator at the Department of Health and Human Services to decide.

This bureaucratic dictatorship is what the Senate has just decided—probably without realizing it—to make full and final.

Do we have any recourse, any way to reclaim our republic? Well, yes. We have one election left. The central issue of that election is now shaping up clearly: are there any limits on the power of government, including the requirement that the people's representatives make the laws? The Senate has just had its vote on that question—and in November, we will have our vote.