You could be forgiven for supposing that this week’s big news is the debate over the government takeover of the health insurance industry, with a side dish of political theater over the Fed’s role in Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch.

But in the dead of night, with a minuscule amount of public debate, it appears that full-floor votes will be taken in the House of Representatives today on the Waxman-Markey Act, the so-called “cap-and-trade,” or national energy tax bill. How on earth did this thing get so far, so fast? Does it have a chance of passage? And most important, what’s in it?

We know very little for sure about this legislation. We know that if it passes in Congress and the Senate, the President is sure to sign it into law. We also know that not a blessed one of the people’s representatives in Washington is likely to have read and fully comprehended the whole thing. This is no way to make law.

Obama came to office promising cap-and-trade as one of his most important legislative priorities. It’s also long been a stated goal of Henry Waxman, the hyper-left-wing Congressman from Beverly Hills who was installed as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a backroom coup by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I was sure for many months that cap-and-trade would be among this year’s legislative casualties. Obama, Waxman and Pelosi aren’t people you associate with anything that’s good for the health of the private economy. And the way they originally sold the idea made it seem unlikely to have broad appeal.

And how did they sell it? Remember during the Presidential campaign last year, when Obama was caught in a rare moment of candor on the subject? It’s on tape. He said that under cap-and-trade, electricity rates would “skyrocket” (he literally used that word), and that anyone seeking to build new coal-fired electric capacity would face bankruptcy. To candidate Obama, this economic damage was a perfectly acceptable cost of trying to reduce emissions of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

But this year, you didn’t hear a lot about sharply raising the cost of carbon-based energy as a way of reducing global warming. In February, the talk was all about using cap-and-trade to fund nationalized health care. You see, it was anticipated that cap-and-trade would produce almost a trillion-dollar revenue stream over the next several years.

How was cap-and-trade supposed to extract up to a trillion dollars from the economy and make it available to fund health-care? By strictly limiting the amount of carbon that drivers, industrial companies, farms or electric utilities would be allowed to emit, and then letting companies trade their emission permits among each other. The revenue was supposed to come from auctioning those permits to the highest bidders.

Now I’m sure you’ve heard the standard critique of cap-and-trade from business publications and from right-wing commentators. If we put a big new tax on carbon-based fuels, we make everything more expensive, from driving your car to buying food and manufactured goods. There would have been no way to escape a huge negative impact on the economy.

And it would have been a disparate impact too, especially punishing farm states and regions like the Midwest that use a lot of coal for electricity generation. It would also have punished the Canadians, who have a lot of energy in the Alberta oil-sands that they’d like to sell us.

You’d think that a US cap-and-trade regime would be simple to evade: just move as production (and jobs) out of the country, to more carbon-friendly places. But the legislation’s authors thought of that trick. Countries with carbon-tax regimes that are not substantially in line with ours can expect to suffer punitive import tariffs. In this way, the US can and will export a very expensive energy policy to the rest of the world.

Now don’t you think I was right in supposing that something so economically destructive would have a very hard time making it into law? There is so much going on this year, and Congress isn’t known for doing too many things at once. And besides, what about all the people who would suffer under cap-and-trade? Many of them come from states and districts with Democratic representatives too.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the floor of the House. The Waxman-Markey Act went through an array of very significant changes. For one thing, about 85% of the emissions permits will not be auctioned off in the early years of the law’s operation. Instead, they will be gifted to politically-favored businesses, in states and districts with lawmakers critical to the bill’s passage. Farmers and certain electric utilities will particularly benefit.

This amounts to an outsized transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to private industrial interests. Why is such a thing being allowed with nary a word of debate or public outrage?

And besides, don’t the giveaways mean that in the early years at least, cap-and-trade won’t produce enough revenue to fund national health care? That must be why Obama has gotten onto selling the idea that national health can be funded entirely by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.”

There are also preferences for certain industries, like steel-making, that are deemed to face unreasonable competition from foreign producers if they’re required to pay a tax on their energy usage. Now doesn’t that tell you right there that the authors of cap-and-trade fully understand the adverse impact of what they’re doing? In an ironic twist, domestic oil refiners like Exxon-Mobil and Valero Energy have mounted a PR push to get some of the same preferences, warning that cap-and-trade will cause them to import more finished fuels rather than refine them here.

On top of all that, a whole raft of special giveaways have been larded onto the bill as a way of insuring its passage without debate. Many of these are intended to buy the votes of so-called “Blue dog” Democrats, who come from districts that usually elect Republicans. These people know their constituents will hate them for voting in a national energy tax, and they need bon-bons to offer in return.

I can’t say with a straight face that the opponents of cap-and-trade have the better of the argument. I think it’s a red herring to debate the economically destructive aspects of this idea, which is so large and so far-reaching that in a normal year it would have consumed much of the available bandwidth for public debate.

Instead, I think Waxman-Markey has been distorted far beyond its original objectives. It’s also become a cesspool of special-interest giveaways to rival anything that Congress has ever passed. Who knows what its real impact on the economy will be over time?

And who wrote the thing in the first place? There are over a thousand pages of in there. It’s bigger than the national-health act. Waxman and Markey didn’t write it themselves, in their evening free-time, sitting together over cigars and single-malts, with American Idol running on the TV in the corner.

If it’s like most of what Congress imposes on us, the drafting process was supervised by committee staffers, with a lot of input from the special interests that will be affected by it. Much of the cap-and-trade national energy tax law was likely written by lobbyists.

There’s a lot more to this moment in history than the presence of an historic economic crisis, which in Rahm Emanuel’s deeply obnoxious words must not be wasted. It’s also a moment in which there is essentially no significant opposition in Congress. Because of electoral setbacks, self-inflicted wounds and existential uncertainty, the Republicans will have no impact whatsoever on what happens with cap-and-trade.

It’s stupefying that Congressional Democrats feel confident enough to try to push through a spectacular transformation of the US economy and of global trade, in the dark of night. There’s no way to tell how likely it is that the bill will pass either the House or the Senate. Because there’s been no public debate, there’s no sense for how the public wants its representatives to vote.

Is this hubris? Maybe. But there’s obviously more to it. The current rare moment, which combines an urgent economic crisis with a complete lack of political opposition, will not last. It’s not wise to expect that voters will allow Congress to be so radically left-wing after the mid-term elections. And Senators and Representatives will spend all of next year trying to get re-elected. That’s why, as Rahm Emanuel and Henry Waxman know, it’s now or never.

This is the wrong way to make law. If Waxman-Markey is enacted, the United States and the world will be regretting unforeseen consequences for decades to come. This is a law that can only be passed while the public’s attention is being overloaded with debate on other subjects.

The reek of special interests stealing from us hangs over cap-and-trade like clouds of poisonous fumes. Every American should be disgusted. It’s not a bad time to remember just exactly why some people oppose the big, activist government which has come back into vogue: It’s The Corruption, Stupid!”