MEMORANDUM: Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children [PDF]
June 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
I Oppose Barack Obama Because He’s Black
June 19, 2012 by 1 Comment
By Andrew Klavan | June 18, 2012 | PJ Media
Sam Donaldson, who regularly treated President Ronald Reagan with disrespect, feels he knows exactly why Neil Munro of the right-leaning Daily Caller treated Barack Obama with disrespect. During the president’s recent announcement that he had decided to make up laws by himself from now on, effectively granting immunity to some illegal aliens with a wave of his almighty hand, Munro shouted out a question rather than waiting for the president to leave the podium without taking any questions.
Donaldson’s reaction in part: “Many on the political right believe this president ought not to be there – they oppose him not for his polices and political view but for who he is, an African American!”
Obama’s Post-Constitutional Wingmen
June 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By Jeffrey Lord | June 19, 2012 | American Spectator
Access, bias, herd mentality in Munro incident — the corruption of the White House press corps.
“Good evening, everybody. (Applause.) I would like to welcome you all to the 10-day anniversary of my first 100 days. (Laughter.) I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table. (Laughter.) They’re — where are they? I have to confess I really did not want to be here tonight, but I knew I had to come — just one more problem that I’ve inherited from George W. Bush. (Laughter.)”
— President Obama addressing the 2009 White House Correspondent’s Dinner
You don’t interrupt the president.
So goes the media narrative in the wake of the media hysteria surrounding the Daily Caller‘s Neil Munro and his so-called “heckling” of President Obama.
Yeah, right. This is bunk.
A pluperfect illustration of a double-standard, as was illustrated in this space yesterday with a video clip of the White House press corps not only interrupting then-President Ronald Reagan as he read a statement but then shouting and shrieking at him as he left the room.
Rush Limbaugh: “How cheap. How clichéd. How simplistic. How predictable. How utterly ignorant…” [Video]
June 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Obama Campaign Sends ‘Dreamers’ Fundraising Email Hours after Amnesty Announcement
June 19, 2012 by 1 Comment
By Penny Starr | June 18, 2012 | CNS News
“Right to Dream” students and supporters block the street outside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center Friday June 15, 2012, in Los Angeles to celebrate the Obama administrations decision to stop deporting younger illegal immigrants. Obama says his plan to stop deporting younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children will make the system “more fair, more efficient and more just.” (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
(CNSNews.com) – Seven hours after President Barack Obama announced that some illegal aliens would be allowed to stay in the United States and could be allowed to work here, Katherine Archuleta, Obama’s national campaign director, e-mailed a fundraising letter seeking donations to his re-election effort.
The e-mail, with the subject line “wonderful news,” contains links to the website, where visitors can listen to Obama’s speech on immigration he gave at 2:08 p.m. on Friday in the White House Rose Garden.
Archuleta – who was hailed as the first Latina to run a major presidential campaign when she was named director in June 2011 – sent the e-mail at 9:08 p.m.
“Thanks to our president, this nation’s immigration policy just became more fair and more just,” the letter begins.
Only Voters Can Hold Obama Accountable For Illegal Amnesty Policy
June 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By Ken Klukowski | June 17, 2012 | Breitbart News
President Obama’s new amnesty policy regarding illegal aliens violates the law. But there’s probably no route to trump it either in Congress or in court, so the only recourse is for the American people to trump it by electing a new president.
‘This is What a Dictator Does’- Beck Savages Obama’s Fiat on Illegal Immigrants [Video]
June 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Read the full article here.
Obama Amnesty Plan: Catch, Release, Vote
June 15, 2012 by 1 Comment
By Rush Limbaugh | June 15, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have a name for this new Obama immigration policy. In case you haven’t heard, folks, very quickly. The regime today told the border agents: “If you catch young illegals, let ’em go and grant ’em work permits.” No more deportation of illegal immigrants. They are to be given work permits and they can stay in the country. So what this is is “Catch, Release, Vote.”
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: That is exactly what this is: Catch, Release, Vote.
Executive Fiat: Obama Ignores Constitution in Display of Crass Political Calculus [Video]
June 15, 2012 by 1 Comment
As Commandos Raid Tampa, US State Dept Demands Power to Declare War?
May 27, 2012 by 4 Comments
By Anthony Wile | May 26, 2012 | The Daily Bell
Clinton Goes Commando, Sells Diplomats as Shadow Warriors … Clinton, wearing pearls and a silver and black blouse, climbed the stage and began to speak. And soon it all made more sense. She had an idea to sell — and to defend … She described a vision in which shadowy U.S. and allied Special Operations Forces, working hand in hand with America’s embassies and foreign governments, together play a key role in preventing low-intensity conflicts. And where prevention fails, the same commando-diplomat team goes on the attack … – Wired (5/24/12)
It happened again at the recent Tampa-based conference, “Building the Global SOF Partnership” …
The US military staged a mock drill in violation of 130+ years of the Posse Comitatus Act that bars domestic forces from active use on US soil.
Our Age of Anxiety
May 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By Yuval Levin | May 28, 2012, Vol. 17, NO. 35 | Weekly Standard
Romney’s challenge is to address the deep uneasiness in America and point the way to a comeback.
There is something very strange about the 2012 presidential race so far. The election comes at a time of extraordinary public unease, which clearly demands some response from the political system, and especially from the men running for the highest office in the land. But the two presidential candidates are both running campaigns oddly detached from what is rightly worrying voters.
If you were to judge the state of the country by listening only to the Obama campaign, you would conclude that we are on the verge of the long-awaited triumph of the liberal welfare state, and that all that stands in the way is a gang of retrograde Social Darwinists who somehow manage to be simultaneously nihilistic and theocratic. That band of reactionaries ran the economy into the ground for the sake of their wealthy patrons, and now they’re coming for our social programs and for women’s freedoms. Only if they are held off can the forward march of history proceed.
If you were to judge the state of the country by listening only to the Romney campaign, you would conclude that all was well in America until we took a wrong turn four years ago and elected a president hostile to freedom and prosperity. If we just correct that error and undo what he has done, our economy will be ready to bloom again.
The Psychology of the liberal Mind: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game [Video]
May 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Why Congress Must Confront the Administrative State
May 10, 2012 by 3 Comments
By Robert Moffit, Ph.D. | April 2, 2012 | Heritage Foundation
Abstract: The triumph of the administrative state has been made possible by the emasculation of the legislative power. Washington’s problem is not merely federal spending and debt; it is the arrogance of centralized power. The time is therefore ripe for a major national discussion not only about the size of government, but also about the processes of government. Americans have a choice: to be governed by the rule of law, as hammered out in open legislative debate carried on by elected representatives who are directly accountable to us, or the rule of administrators who are most certainly not accountable to us. The rule of regulators is arbitrary and unaccountable government—exactly what the Founders wished to prevent in crafting the Federal Constitution.
Steve Kroft of CBS recently interviewed President Barack Obama. In response to a question on his job performance, the President ranked himself fourth among America’s chief executives (behind Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln) in the production of policy initiatives.[1]
Critics quickly ridiculed his self-assessment as narcissistic nonsense. They’re wrong.
President Obama is transforming American government. Few Presidents have enjoyed more success in enacting such a large policy agenda in such a short period of time.
- Within weeks of his inauguration, the President signed into law a major expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid.
- He quickly followed this up with the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “stimulus” bill), adding $831 billion to our deficits.
- In 2010, Congress passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd–Frank bill), providing for massive and far-reaching financial regulation.
- And on March 23, 2010, he signed into law the 2,800-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). It is the largest single piece of social legislation in American history, expanding federal control over one-sixth of the American economy and the personal lives of more than 300 million citizens.
Combine this massive legislative production with his zealous regulatory program. While Washington’s bureaucratic regime has been growing since the early 1900s, under President Obama its growth has exploded. In 2009 and 2010 alone, federal agencies issued 7,076 final rules.[2]
While the President insists that his regulatory output is less than that of President George W. Bush, a closer look reveals that his “major” regulations—those having an annual impact of at least $100 million each—were more numerous. Since President Obama took office in 2009, federal agencies have issued 75 major regulations with an annual additional cost to the economy of $38 billion.[3] Taken altogether, the Small Business Administration last year estimated that the total cost of America’s regulatory burden reached $1.75 trillion—more than twice what Americans pay in individual income taxes.[4]
The U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, and Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are at the center of this regulatory storm. They alone account for 43 percent of all rules in the federal pipeline.[5] Of the 43 major rules issued in 2010, 10 were based on EPA mandates.[6] With the President’s health and environmental initiatives alone, the Obama White House has dwarfed the regulatory agenda of its predecessors.
The national health law expands the administrative power of the HHS Secretary beyond anything previously attempted. The Secretary is required to act—indicated by the statutory language “shall”—1,563 times in the final language of the legislation, and 40 specific provisions of the law mandate or permit the issuance of regulations.[7] Senate Republican Policy Committee staff estimate that the new law creates 159 new agencies or entities, but the Congressional Research Service says that the exact number is “unknowable” inasmuch as certain powerful federal offices are created administratively without direct congressional authorization.
While the law’s schedule of implementation stretches out over eight years, the most far-reaching provisions—the mandates on individuals, employers, and states—take effect in 2014. Nonetheless, in less than two years, the national health law has already generated over 11,000 pages of rules, regulations, and guidelines and related paperwork in the Federal Register.
Just consider the law’s 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The powerful board will make its initial recommendations for detailed and specific Medicare payment cuts in January 2015, and the Secretary is empowered to put them into effect unless Congress enacts an alternative set of payment cuts to meet statutory Medicare spending targets.[8] The board’s automatic recommendations are subject to neither administrative nor judicial review, and the law further requires a three-fifths Senate majority to block IPAB’s prescriptions.
Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has observed that the extraordinary power of this new board is “the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve.”[9]
In 2010 alone, Congress enacted 217 bills that became law, but that same year, federal agencies issued 3,573 final rules covering a wide variety of economic activities.[10] Today, more than at any other time in our history, we are less and less governed by the rule of law, hammered out in legislative deliberations as the Founders intended, and more and more governed by the rule of regulation. We are subject to edicts promulgated by administrators—persons we do not know and will never know, persons protected by civil service law and tenure who are not accountable to us and will never be accountable to us. Nonetheless, the administrators’ detailed decisions have the force of law.
Regulation, as law, can and does directly affect whether or not we can start or run our businesses, determine how many persons we can or cannot afford to hire, how we may or may not use our land or dispose of our property. Not only do administrators publish thousands of pages of regulations, but our fellow citizens can sometimes also go to jail for violating them.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing the triumph of the administrative state, but that conquest is only possible because of the emasculation of the legislative power. The Founders made Congress the lawgiver, as clarified in Article I, Section 1 of the Federal Constitution. So much of their focus, reflected in The Federalist and other writings, was on how to check and balance the predominant legislative power, to channel and contain personal ambition and factional interest, to restrain potentially tyrannical majorities and safeguard the rights of beleaguered minorities, to secure personal liberty and protect the rights of property.
Though federal power has grown steadily since President Washington took the oath of office, today the relationship between the individual and the government is changing in a qualitative way. Americans are increasingly the subjects of an administrative regime rather than the free citizens of a democratic republic with a limited government.
Picking Winners and Losers. This steady transfer of legislative power to administrators has another inescapable consequence: arbitrary rule. The champions of administrative power invariably couch their arguments in appeals to expertise. The more complex the economic sector to be planned or regulated, the more that strict uniformity in the application of the rules becomes problematic.
In broad congressional grants of power, lawmakers give administrators wide latitude in the development and enforcement of the rules, so those who make the rules can also unmake them by granting waivers and exemptions. In the case of the health care law, HHS has already granted over 1,722 temporary waivers to certain businesses, unions, and gourmet restaurants in San Francisco that don’t have to comply with national coverage rules that apply to other companies throughout the country.
Treating similarly situated Americans differently, either as individual citizens or as citizens of a particular state, amounts to arbitrary rule; and arbitrary rule is inherently unjust.
THE NEED FOR A HIGHER LEVEL OF PUBLIC DEBATE
Today’s debate over the powerful bureaucracy is usually framed in terms of economic impact: How will federal rules affect economic growth and job creation, the price of gasoline or electricity, the cost of health insurance or the quality of medical care? While this level of debate is necessary, it is insufficient. Yes, we cannot neglect the trees, but it is really the health of the forest that matters.
The big question is this: How does this bureaucratic ascendancy affect ordinary Americans? My answer: Our very civic life is at stake, not just our prosperity.
The current trend is an affront to our self-government. The tacit assumption: Millions of us are not smart enough to make our own decisions for ourselves. Rather, we need to be closely supervised by officials. They will prescribe for us, for example, what kind of light bulbs and washing machines we should use. The provision of nutritional or caloric information on restaurant menus, or food items dispensed through vending machines, is now a federal mandate under Section 4205 of the Affordable Care Act.
Our supervision, though distant and impersonal, becomes more precise and detailed. We are to become increasingly dependent on government for our well-being. Today, almost half of Americans (48.5 percent) live in households that are getting some form of government assistance, largely funded from federal revenues, but nearly half (49.5 percent) of our citizens pay no federal income taxes. But today’s Progressives are still dissatisfied. In their view, the many are to be even more dependent on the few, and the few (the hated “rich,” however they are defined) should be paying even more in taxes than they do today.
Over time, these dynamics will change the character of our people, with corrosive consequences for our political culture and our economic prosperity. America will have a progressively larger class of dependent citizens, and that spirit of freedom and independence for which the Founders risked their lives and fortunes will be broken.
It does not have to be this way. Our task is to paint the big picture, the overarching framework of American civic life. The great medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, the “First Whig,” defines law as an edict of reason, promulgated by the sovereign for the common good of the community.[11] The law instructs citizens in their rights and duties, and thus has a teaching function. That being the case, as lawmakers, you must become teachers of the Constitution, carriers of our rich political culture of republican government.
What must we do to preserve and protect the constitutional traditions of limited government, individual liberty, the separation of powers, and the unique advantages of federalism? James Madison, “the Father of The Constitution,” was not a lawyer, but he was a Congressman. And in that role, he was also a teacher: He routinely employed his formidable talents in the education of his colleagues and fellow citizens on the first principles of government.
In my reading of the public mood, you also have an eager audience. More and more Americans hunger for the wisdom of the Founders, are reading their biographies, and seek to understand their tightly reasoned arguments for the adoption of our Constitution. They are also becoming aware that there is something deeply wrong with the way in which they are being governed and that this process deviates from the intentions of the Founders. They correctly sense that modern government is ever more distant and disconnected from them. They are right.
HOW WE GOT HERE
President Obama, like President Woodrow Wilson, is a real “Progressive,” but what does that mean? In his recent speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, he recalled President Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.”[12] A genuine Progressive, TR favored the imposition of inheritance taxes and the income tax and became the standard bearer of the Progressive Party in 1912.
Reflecting that tradition, President Obama and his ideological allies are also vigorous champions of aggressive executive power.[13] Commenting on President Obama’s governance, New York Times columnist David Brooks predicts, “When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era…. It’s a progressive era based on faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.”[14]
Welcome to the “100 Years War” of American politics. Progressivism, after all, was America’s dominant political movement from 1890 to 1920. While the Progressives are identified with social reform and the reining in of corporate interests and trusts, they focused intensely on structural reform of government, particularly civil service reform and the democratization of our politics.
No modern American political movement has been more successful. Within a relatively short span of time, progressives backed the adoption of four transformative amendments to the Constitution. They fostered the income tax (Sixteenth Amendment) and secured direct election of U.S. Senators (Seventeenth Amendment); many backed Prohibition (Eighteenth Amendment); and they allied with the suffragettes (Nineteenth Amendment). In the several states, they broke the power of the political bosses and enacted initiative and referenda and the recall of public officials.
Long before the New Deal of the 1930s, Progressives concentrated power in Washington. With the backing of the Progressives, Congress created the Federal Reserve System (1913) and the Federal Trade Commission (1914). Federal employment soared.[15] During the Great War, Congress (in the Overman Act of 1918) gave President Wilson enormous discretionary power to consolidate and rearrange executive offices and agencies. Meanwhile, dissent, especially criticism of America’s entry into the war, was suppressed.
“Permissiveness,” the hallmark of the Sixties, was never welcome among Progressives, old or new. Under the rule of the new Progressives, if you want to just “do your own thing,” you won’t. You will do what you are told. If you think you can just “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” think again. You will be forced, for example, to buy government-approved health benefits—including federally certified abortifacients—or pay a fine. You will behave. You will conform. You will comply. You will not march to a different drummer.
The old Progressives were earnest and well-intentioned—old-fashioned “do gooders.” They were also stern and sober social reformers. During the Progressive Era, Congress suppressed the lottery business and interstate prostitution. They enforced prohibition on the sale and manufacture of alcohol,[16] and they imposed taxes on narcotics. Personal vice had become a public enemy. Professor Charles Beard, a leading Progressive historian, wrote in 1930: “Perhaps no country in the world, except Russia, places so many restraints on what is called ‘personal liberty,’ the right to do as one pleases in personal conduct and on the use of property.”[17]
Because Progressivism is an old and recurrent stream in our public life, its influence on public policy is so immense that it is a given: part of our national landscape. Progressive intellectuals generally had—and still have—a profound faith in social science, a conviction that scientific expertise was the key to social progress, especially in a social and economic order that was increasingly complex. Administration was to be the change agent. Again, Beard: “Thus, in our day, a new social science is being staked out and developed—the science of administration in a ‘great society.’ If the ‘great society’ is to endure, then it must make itself master of administration.”[18]
For Progressives, true liberty was not merely freedom from, or “negative” liberty, meaning freedom from arbitrary rule or tyrannical coercion, as embodied in the venerable natural rights tradition of the American Revolution. True liberty was the freedom to be, to act, to grow personally and to fulfill one’s potential.
This was “positive” liberty. It was to be achieved by the removal of economic and customary restraints, creating fairness in social and economic relations, liberating all persons, regardless of class or condition, from the unwelcome vicissitudes of the market and providing child care, education, universal health care, and pensions: in short, security. Justification for government action would be grounded, as Beard argued, not in power, but in service. This new liberty would be secured through broad-scale central planning and social and economic regulation.
Positive liberty, therefore, was to be achieved through the positive state. Think personal “growth” in a straitjacket.
Such ideological assumptions justified a federal role in health care and a national system of social insurance (based on the German model) for pensions in the Progressive Party platform of 1912. They explain the passion for centralization of power, particularly in the executive branch of national government, where scientific expertise would be able to work its will. “Progressivism,” wrote Professor Ralph Gabriel of Yale University, “was an aspect of the rising cult of science.”[19]
But Progressivism carries within it the seeds of contradiction. While Progressives long championed the democratization of our institutions, sunlight in government, and the elimination of the baneful influence of corporate interests, they clung stubbornly to a faith that public problems could be effectively solved through bureaucratic decision-making: little bands of experts appointed to an expanding number of government boards, commissions, or panels. That is at the heart of the Progressive conception of modern government.[20]
Populist rhetoric notwithstanding, the reality of Progressive rule is profoundly undemocratic, precisely because it takes crucial decision-making that directly affects the lives of millions of citizens “out of politics.” Thus, you have the administrative state: the rule of administrators.
Read the full article here.
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Judicial Review v. Judicial Activism
April 14, 2012 by 4 Comments
By Mark Alexander | April 12, 2012 | The Patriot Post
SCOTUS and Constitutional Authority
“No legislative act … contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.” –Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78 (1787)
Last week, seeing that his signature legislative achievement was in jeopardy, Barack Hussein Obama fired a shot across the bow of the Supreme Court as it considered the constitutionality of his so-called “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (a.k.a., ObamaCare). Obama warned the court against “judicial activism.”
“I am confident,” proclaimed Obama, “that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. I just remind conservative commentators that for years what we have heard the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example and I am pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step. … [T]hat’s not just my opinion, that’s the opinion of a whole lot of constitutional law professors and academics and judges and lawyers who have examined this law.”
Actually, as Obama knows well, the Supreme Court’s consideration of ObamaCare is not an example of judicial activism as Obama erroneously claims, unless the Court actually upheld the institution of socialized medicine as constitutionally compliant.
In fact, SCOTUS is exercising appropriate judicial review as outlined in Article III of our Constitution, and established as precedent in 1803 with the Court’s Marbury v. Madison decision under Chief Justice John Marshall. In that fundamental case, Marshall wrote, “The powers of the legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written. … [T]he framers of the constitution contemplated that instrument, as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the legislature.”
Marbury v. Madison is often derided as the beginning of the end of Liberty. However, it certainly was consistent with our Framers’ intent, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78: “[T]he courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges as, a fundamental law. It, therefore, belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.”
The unfortunate consequence of the Marbury precedent is that it rendered the Constitution vulnerable to broad extra-constitutional interpretation, should the courts ever become highly politicized — as indeed they did in the 20th century, from FDR forward.
Judicial review was and remains a foundational component of republican federalism and was instituted to preserve Liberty. However, as Thomas Jefferson feared when warning the judiciary could become the “despotic branch,” the federal court’s checks and balances have been adulterated by judicial activists who, in the words of the venerable Senator Sam Ervin, “interpret the Constitution to mean what it would have said if [they], instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.”
Thus, now, as Jefferson warned, “The Constitution [will be] a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
Read the full article here.
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Alarms Over Obama Coup Against Constitution Surging
April 13, 2012 by 1 Comment
By Bob Unruh | April 13, 2012 | WND
‘2nd term free of electoral restraints may be a frightening prospect’
There always have been those few who have launched diatribes over the dictatorial actions of any given U.S. presidential administration, over civil rights, foreign affairs, the economy, the draft or a dozen other topics – even though the Constitution was written specifically to prevent the collection of too much power by one branch of government.
Now, again, there are words like “egocentric megalomaniac” being ascribed to the White House, and warnings about detention camps and government surveillance of its citizens.
But where previous generations of warnings emanated from lone wolves with their fax machines in dusty spare rooms, the current alarms are being issued by the likes of Investors Business Daily, First Amendment authority Nat Hentoff, New York Times best-selling author Robert Ringer and their equals.
“A second term free of electoral restraints [for Obama] may be a frightening prospect,” IBD wrote in a commentary in the last week. “This is, after all, a president who has said he can’t wait for Congress to act and will govern by executive order and regulations if necessary. He has questioned the Supreme Court’s ‘unprecedented’ review of Obamacare.”
The publication pointed out that the Obama administration already is in contempt of court – in a court dispute over its ban on oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
When U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the Obama Interior Department unconstitutionally imposed an offshore drilling moratorium, the agency “simply established a second ban that was virtually identical.”
“Judge Feldman was not amused. ‘Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,’ Feldman said in his ruling. ‘Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second moratorium …. provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt,’” the editorial said.
The issue recently was brought into the headlines by comments from Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News analyst who said, “I think the president is dangerously close to totalitarianism. A few months ago he was saying the Congress doesn’t count. The Congress doesn’t mean anything. I am going to rule by decree and by administrative regulation. Now he’s basically saying the Supreme Court doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t review our legislation.
“That would leave just him as the only branch of government standing,” Napolitano said.
His comments came after statements from Obama that the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t take the “unprecedented” action of actually overturning the Obamacare law, even though that is exactly what courts do when justices determine the legislation is unconstitutional.
“I think he [Obama] has some problems with understanding the Constitution, or accepting limitations on his power,” said Napolitano. “Look, they’re equal branches of government, but with respect to what the law means and what the Constitution means, the court is superior to the president.”
His comments came recently on Neil Cavuto’s program, when the discussion turned to the U.S. Supreme Court’s discussion of the unconstitutionality of Obamacare and Obama’s verbal attack on the court shortly after the oral arguments.
Here are Napolitano’s comments:
Read the full article here.
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Obama as Farce
April 12, 2012 by 2 Comments
By William L. Gensert | April 11, 2012 | American Thinker
Karl Marx said history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Barack Obama has reversed that. His first term was certainly farce; his second will be tragedy.
Obama has Forrest Gumped his way through his presidency, except without the success, charm, and endearing sweetness of the original. He has given America three and a half years of farce, even if no one is laughing.
He is an adumbrated president, desperate about his re-election prospects. Sold as a bipartisan moderate, a post-racial healer, a transformative leader — we were told he would not just solve our problems, but heal the earth and save humanity.
The president has governed as a hyper-partisan, race-baiting, barely present tyrant with absolutely no leadership skills and little regard for the constitution. His daily ululations paint anyone who dares to disagree as evil and un-American. People are either pro-Barack or an enemy of the nation — there is no in-between.
It is the intangible aspects of the presidency where Barack Obama is most adept: entertaining, vacationing, and golf. The parties are legendary and extravagant. Bringing the NBA to the White House, or the NFL or Motown or Broadway — when he feels like it, the party comes to him. The vacations are even more extravagant, and the golf…everyone knows about the golf. He may not be good, but at least he puts in the time.
America has to pay for it all, but this is an opportunity to see the true Barack Obama, surrounded by minions and sycophants constantly telling him how great he is. Is it any surprise he wants four more years of this?
Obama hagiographer Davis Guggenheim has said, “I mean, the negative for me was there were too many accomplishments.” Barack wholeheartedly agrees; after all didn’t he recently say, “My entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism”?
Popeil’s Pocket President, brought to you by Ronco, or Rahm Emanuel — one of those. At least the Pocket Fisherman worked. Barack doesn’t work; it’s all parties, vacations, and golf — in between, he practices verbal assassination of anyone who disagrees. Chin up, he turns away and looks off in the distance, à la Mussolini, as the applause and adulation reverberate from the rafters.
“No, please,” he pleads, “I do this for you.”
In less than four years, he has reduced America to the laughingstock of the world. We are threatened by Iran with nuclear Armageddon, while he lines up a putt and tells us what his imaginary son would look like.
He talks of “flexibility,” while he plots both unilateral disarmament and the scrapping of missile defense. With no deterrent and no defensive capability, the nation will be defenseless and impotent.
Read the full article here.
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What’s Obama Thinking? Wickard, not Marbury
April 8, 2012 by 4 Comments
By Neo-Neocon | April 6, 2012 | PJ Media
When he talks precedence, he means the astounding 1942 case.
Obama’s remarks about the Supreme Court and ObamaCare have been criticized by conservative pundits as intemperate, inflammatory, and ignorant. What was he thinking when he said the Court would be taking an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it overturned a law duly passed by Congress? How could a constitutional law professor not have heard of Marbury v. Madison, which long ago established that the Court may do exactly that?
When Obama attempted damage control the next day, his remarks provided a clue as to what he might have been thinking in terms of precedent — and it wasn’t Marbury v. Madison:
[L]et me be very specific. We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right? So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre-New Deal.
[T]he Court has traditionally exercised significant restraint and deference to our duly elected legislature, our Congress. And so the burden is on those who would overturn a law like this. … I expect the Supreme Court actually to recognize that and to abide by well-established precedence out there.
In the late 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was proposing — and the Democratic Congress under him was passing — laws that would have required the Court to allow the federal government power to regulate interstate commerce far beyond any that had been granted before in this country. The resulting fight within the Court was similar to the battle today: textualists and originalists on the conservative side; proponents of a living Constitution almost infinitely malleable on the liberal side.
FDR first tried to retaliate against the conservative justices by packing the Court. That attempt failed, but his intimidation nevertheless managed to transforms the Court into an instrument far more in line with his wishes. The shift had an especially profound effect on the judicial review of legislative actions that affect commerce:
Prior to the New Deal the judiciary was seen as guardian of the Constitution, ensuring that government activities of all kinds squared with the principles of the federal charter. Following the New Deal era, the judiciary’s function changed to one of “bifurcated review,” allowing great deference to the political branches in regulating economic matters and applying heightened scrutiny to government encroachments on civil liberties. [emphasis added]
It didn’t hurt, either, that during his extended tenure as president Roosevelt ultimately appointed eight of its nine justices, affecting the Court’s tenor long past his service and solidifying the extreme liberalizing trend.
How liberal and how extreme? Although Charles Dickens had his Oliver Twist character Mr. Bumble famously declare the law to be “a ass,” most people may not realize just how big an ass the law can be until they study the 1942 Supreme Court ruling Wickard v. Filburn.
Read the full article here.
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Is Obama ‘Dangerously Close To Totalitarianism?’ [Video]
April 6, 2012 by 5 Comments
IBD Editorials | April 05, 2012 | Investor’s Business Daily
Power: Given the president’s end-runs around Congress, his shredding of the Constitution and his assault on the authority of the courts, a second term free of electoral restraints may be a frightening prospect.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News commentator, raised the question on Neil Cavuto’s “Your World” show Wednesday. And while it seems fanciful in light of the safeguards built into our democracy and its institutions, it recognizes the threat posed by the president’s policies and actions if left unchecked.
“I think the president is dangerously close to totalitarianism,” Napolitano opined.” A few months ago he was saying, ‘The Congress doesn’t count, the Congress doesn’t mean anything, I am going to rule by decree and by administrative regulation.’
“Now he’s basically saying the Supreme Court doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t review our legislation. That would leave just him as the only branch of government standing.”
Read the full article here.
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Obama’s branches of government
April 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment
By William Warren | April 5, 2012 | NetRightDaily
NRD Editor’s Note: As always, you may reprint this cartoon anywhere you please, but we ask that you provide a link back to this source. To see more Warren Toons, click here.
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State Nullification
April 5, 2012 by 2 Comments
By Tom Woods | TomWoods.com
What Is It?
State nullification is the idea that the states can and must refuse to enforce unconstitutional federal laws.
Says Who?
Says Thomas Jefferson, among other distinguished Americans. His draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 first introduced the word “nullification” into American political life, and follow-up resolutions in 1799 employed Jefferson’s formulation that “nullification…is the rightful remedy” when the federal government reaches beyond its constitutional powers. In the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, James Madison said the states were “duty bound to resist” when the federal government violated the Constitution.
But Jefferson didn’t invent the idea. Federalist supporters of the Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788 assured Virginians that they would be “exonerated” should the federal government attempt to impose “any supplementary condition” upon them – in other words, if it tried to exercise a power over and above the ones the states had delegated to it. Patrick Henry and later Jefferson himself elaborated on these safeguards that Virginians had been assured of at their ratifying convention.
What’s the Argument for It?
Here’s an extremely basic summary:
1) The states preceded the Union. The Declaration of Independence speaks of “free and independent states” that “have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.” The British acknowledged the independence not of a single blob, but of 13 states, which they proceeded to list one by one. Article II of the Articles of Confederation says the states “retain their sovereignty, freedom, and independence”; they must have enjoyed that sovereignty in the past in order for them to “retain” it in 1781 when the Articles were officially adopted. The ratification of the Constitution was accomplished not by a single, national vote, but by the individual ratifications of the various states, each assembled in convention.
2) In the American system no government is sovereign. The peoples of the states are the sovereigns. It is they who apportion powers between themselves, their state governments, and the federal government. In doing so they are not impairing their sovereignty in any way. To the contrary, they are exercising it.
3) Since the peoples of the states are the sovereigns, then when the federal government exercises a power of dubious constitutionality on a matter of great importance, it is they themselves who are the proper disputants, as they review whether their agent was intended to hold such a power. No other arrangement makes sense. No one asks his agent whether the agent has or should have such-and-such power. In other words, the very nature of sovereignty, and of the American system itself, is such that the sovereigns must retain the power to restrain the agent they themselves created. James Madison explains this clearly in the famous Virginia Report of 1800.
Why Do We Need It?
As Jefferson warned, if the federal government is allowed to hold a monopoly on determining the extent of its own powers, we have no right to be surprised when it keeps discovering new ones. If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, it will continue to grow – regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power. In his Report of 1800, Madison reminded Virginians and Americans at large that the judicial branch was not infallible, and that some remedy must be found for those cases in which all three branches of the federal government exceed their constitutional limits.
Read the full article here.
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Rush Limbaugh: How to Respond to Obama’s Lies?
April 4, 2012 by 6 Comments
Rush Limbaugh | April 04, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Jan Crawford. She’s at CBS News. She was on television this morning, CBS This Morning, reporting about the reaction to Obama’s remarks that the court, Supreme Court, should not overturn the health care reform law. CRAWFORD: The president appears to be laying the groundwork to take on the court if it strikes down that law. For the second straight day President Obama gave his take on what the Supreme Court should do: uphold his signature domestic achievement. Monday he seemed to suggest the court didn’t even have the power to strike down the law. On Obama’s comments, Republicans pounced.
RUSH ARCHIVE: What is this, the court must understand? That is a threat.
CRAWFORD: It went beyond talk radio. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell released a statement saying the president lacked fundamental respect for the separation of powers. Yesterday afternoon the judges struck back. A federal appeals court in Houston issued an order to the Justice Department to explain whether the president really meant the court had no power to strike down the law.
RUSH: And that’s the key, and I just saw Attorney General Holder on television, (paraphrasing) “Of course we’re gonna respond. Of course it will be an appropriate response. And of course we understand Marbury v. Madison. Of course we understand the court’s final say-so on whether laws are constitutional. But we must remember that the court has always practiced deference,” said Holder. The court’s always been deferential. So he’s trying to have it both ways. “Oh, yeah, we understand the court strikes down laws of Congress. They better not strike this one down.” But, again, at the risk of being redundant, Obama knows that there’s judicial review. He knows that the court does this. He’s not ignorant or stupid or uneducated. What he did yesterday had nothing to do with the court, not purposely.
The unintended consequence is that he has shown a profound disrespect for the court, and he is relegating them to a status in his mind of being inconsequential. They’re simply there to rubber stamp him. And if they don’t rubber stamp him, they are in the crosshairs, and that’s his message to ’em. They had better rubber stamp his health care bill, and if they don’t, then they’re targets. And the way they’re targets is he’s telling the American people, “Those guys, those judges, they’re taking away your health care. They are the ones that are gonna make it so that you have financial ruin if you get sick. They are taking away what I gave you.” Ladies and gentlemen, it is so beneath the dignity of the ofice of the presidency. It’s just striking, it really is. It defies description.
I must be honest with you here. We’ve faced this countless times before during the Clinton years with the Democrat Party and the people at the highest levels of their leadership showing total disregard and disrespect for traditions, ethics, just being polite, manners, showing respect. And I don’t know about anybody else, but I’ve always struggled with how to react to it and how to explain it to people in a way that is persuasive. I guess I’ve always struggled with the way to explain to people to pierce the partisanship. ‘Cause I don’t need to persuade you. You all know how atrocious this is. You know how shameful, how embarrassing this is. But his audience doesn’t, the people he’s speaking to you.
Read the full article here.
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John Malcolm 