I wish I could be on the wrong side of nearly every issue and still end up drawing a giant salary with federal benefits.

“When this bill was passed, it was passed by people who knew how to make light bulbs,” says Randall Moorhead, vice president of government affairs at Philips, a leading light bulb producer. “Everyone supported it. And since then, it’s created more choice for consumers – we have two incandescent bulbs on the market that weren’t there before.”

But in an effort to score political points in the 2012 election cycle, Republican lawmakers have made patently false statements about the law – calling it a ban on incandescent light bulbs. Michigan Republican Fred Upton, who supported the law in 2007, is now back peddling and claiming that the efficiency standard is an example of “federal overreach.”