Many lawmakers — from Minnesota to Alaska to Missouri to North Dakota — are scouring for ways to block any new regulations the administration has in mind to apply. They may represent different industries, but their message is identical: Congress, not the EPA, should have the final say on how to regulate greenhouse emissions.

The latest figure to enter the ring is Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who introduced legislation today that would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases from “stationary sources” for two years. Stationary sources, of course, would include things like coal-fired electric plants, which want nothing more than to protect their access to unlimited supplies of cheap coal, much of which comes from West Virginia. For Rockefeller, the issue is one of economy.

Today, we took important action to safeguard jobs, the coal industry, and the entire economy as we move toward clean coal technology. This legislation will issue a two year suspension on EPA regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources — giving Congress the time it needs to address an issue as complicated and expansive as our energy future.

Congress, not the EPA, must be the ideal decision-maker on such a challenging issue.

That argument might be more persuasive if Congress could prove that it’s capable of being that decision-maker. Instead, on the toughest issues of the day — from health care reform, to deficit spending, to financial reform, to climate change — lawmakers have been frozen in a permanent state of partisan bickering that’s left nearly 300 House-passed bills sitting idle in the Senate.

The dysfunction hasn’t been lost on The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, who wonders this morning why lawmakers are so angry at the EPA for stepping in to tackle a pressing problem that Congress hasn’t.

“If Congress is so concerned, why can’t it get its act together and control greenhouse gas emissions so the EPA doesn’t have to?” Capehart asks. “The president and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson have said over and over again that they want Congress to pass comprehensive climate change legislation. They have had and will have plenty of time to get it done.

“So, folks, what’s the hold up?”

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, issued a statement calling the House bill “one of the biggest pieces of corporate welfare ever to be considered by Congress, with $170 billion in giveaways to polluting industries.”

Big oil, dirty coal, corporate agribusiness — they all got a piece of the pie. The notion that the bill was onerous on business is laughable. Some of the worst polluters helped write the blueprint the bill was based on.

Now these greedy corporations are angling for more, and Senator Graham is out to help them. This is special interest politics at its worst, and it is truly appalling. No wonder so many people are turned off by the ways of Washington.

And with corporations recently freed by the Supreme Court to spend endlessly on federal elections, you can pretty much kiss any meaningful climate change legislation goodbye.

Enter Common Cause, which, using figures gathered from Senate documents and the Center for Responsive Politics, reveals today that the gas, oil, mining and electric interests have combined to spend nearly $24 million lobbying Congress on the bill in the first three months of this year alone, while tallying another $4 million on direct campaign contributions over the same span.

“The energy industry is betting millions that they can buy influence in Congress and protect their profits, even if it means blocking an important step towards clean, renewable energy and a healthier planet,” Common Cause President Bob Edgar said in a statement accompanying the report.

House lawmakers passed their version of the controversial cap-and-trade climate bill last month, with Senate leaders hoping to take up their own (yet-unreleased) version later this year, even despite a tight legislative calendar. Leading the Senate charge is Environmental and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who held a hearing earlier this week to guide the direction of the bill.

Proving that the energy industry knows where to turn the screws, members of the EPW panel have received more than $2.1 million in contributions from the oil, gas, mining and electric industries in the last 30 months. Leading the list of recipients is Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), the senior Republican on the panel who for much of this decade fought the idea that global warming is real. Inhofe has toned down his message over the years — at this week’s hearing he merely accused Democrats of “subsidizing the East and West coasts at the expense of the heartland” — but his ability to pull in campaign cash from the nation’s biggest polluters has remained constant. Indeed, they’ve given him more than $630,000 since 2007.