The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom
and individual liberty
"There
is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it
steadily." --George
Washington
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Today, the Constitution turns 226 years old. Let’s not
forget it states that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be
faithfully executed.”
The Obama Administration has done the opposite,
turning the law on its head and ignoring constitutional limitations on its
power. Read the Constitution now
Here are five of the
Administration’s largest violations:
1.
Changing Obamacare on the fly without congressional action
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
requires that businesses employing 50 or more full-time employees must provide
health insurance or pay a fine per uncovered employee. The law schedules this
mandate to begin in January 2014. Yet the Administration has already announced
that it will put this requirement on hold.
Meanwhile, Congress explicitly considered and
rejected proposed amendments to Obamacare that would have created a specific
allowance for a congressional health insurance subsidy in the exchanges, and
indeed, such an exemption is illegal. But the Administration told Members of
Congress and their staffers that it would give them a generous taxpayer-funded
subsidy just the same.
Obamacare won’t work as written, and the
Administration is just seizing power unilaterally to rewrite it.
2.
Implementing the DREAM Act by executive fiat
Congress has repeatedly considered, and rejected, a
bill known as the Dream Act that would effectively grant amnesty to many
illegal aliens. Yet in June 2012, Department of Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano issued a directive to immigration officials instructing them
to defer deportation proceedings against an estimated 1.7 million illegal
aliens. Oddly, this happened about a year after President Obama admitted that
“the President doesn’t have the authority to simply ignore Congress and say,
‘We’re not going to enforce the laws you’ve passed.’”
3.
Making “recess appointments” while the Senate was in session
In January 2012, President Obama made four “recess”
appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, claiming that the Senate was not available to
confirm those appointees. Yet the Senate was not in recess at that time.
The Recess Appointments Clause is not an alternative to Senate confirmation and
is supposed to be only a stopgap for times when the Senate is unable to provide
advice and consent. Eventually, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit struck
down the appointments to the NLRB as unconstitutional.
4.
Waiving welfare work requirements
In July 2012, the Department of Health and Human
Services gutted the work requirements out of the welfare reform law passed in
1996. It notified states of Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s “willingness to
exercise her waiver authority” so that states may eliminate the work
participation requirement of Section 407 of the 1996 reforms. This flatly
contradicts the law, which provides that waivers granted under other sections
of the law “shall not affect the applicability of section 407 to the State.”
Despite this unambiguous language, the Obama Administration continues to flout
the law with its “revisionist” interpretation.
5.
Encouraging federal contractors to violate the law
The WARN Act requires that federal contractors give
60 days’ notice before a mass layoff or plant closing. Employers who do not
give notice are liable for employees’ back pay and benefits as well as
additional penalties. With defense-related spending cuts set to start on January
2, 2013, defense contractors should have issued notice by November 2, 2012
(just four days before the presidential election). Yet, the Department of Labor
instructed defense contractors not to issue notice for layoffs due to
sequestration until after the election—and assured them they would be
reimbursed with taxpayer funds for any subsequent liability for violating the
law.
One of the Constitution’s strongest features is its
simplicity. It doesn’t serve as a laundry list of rights, as many modern constitutions
attempt to do. Instead, it lays out a governing framework, divides power among
three co-equal branches, and protects Americans from having their rights
usurped by an overreaching government.
But for the Constitution to survive the next
quarter-millennium, we need leaders who are dedicated to maintaining it, not
stretching it to suit their immediate political needs.
Republicans Need Future-Looking Policies, not old
Bromides A Commentary by Michael Barone
Republicans have been getting a lot of advice on how
they should change their party ever since Mitt Romney's defeat in November
2012. They need it. They are in more than the usual disarray that afflicts
parties out of the White House. Many members of their majority in the House of
Representatives are out of step with the Republican leadership on issues
ranging from Syria to defunding Obamacare.
They have a clutch of presidential candidates who
are little known nationally and take starkly different stands on issues. Any recent uptick in polls represents more a
rejection of the Obama Democrats than an embrace of their opponents. So
Republicans would do well to listen to advice, even from unlikely political
quarters and from the far corners of the earth. Two articles in the past week
warrant attention, even though they seem to propose opposite courses.
In one corner are William Galston and Elaine
Kamarck, Democrats who held top jobs in the Clinton White House, writing in The
Washington Post. They point back to
their 1989 manifesto, "The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the
Presidency." Democrats suffered, they argued, from mistaken beliefs that
they could win the presidency by some combination of liberal orthodoxy and
mobilizing core constituencies. They
argued that Democrats' previous victories in congressional and state elections
wouldn't continue indefinitely, as conservative Southerners would start to vote
Republican. Their analysis proved prescient. Bill Clinton, campaigning as a New
Democrat, captured the White House in 1992. And Republicans finally broke
through and won a majority in the House in 1994. Today, they say, Republicans
stand where Democrats did in 1989. They need to be more moderate. They
should reject "hyper-individualistic libertarianism,"
"mean-spirited words" and (in an uncharacteristically nasty analogy)
"the tea party's Wahhabi-style drive to restore pure, uncompromised
conservatism."
A different recommendation comes from overseas.
British parliamentarian Douglas Carswell, in a Telegraph blogpost, interprets
the Sept. 8 victory of Tony Abbott and his center-right Liberal Party in
Australia as a vote for full-throated conservatism. Abbott opposes abortion and same-sex marriage;
he is a skeptic on global warming; and he wants to end immigration of
asylum-seekers. The left-wing Oz
commentariat said that made him unelectable. Yet he won big. Carswell's
advice to British Conservatives and, by implication, American Republicans is to "stop drifting to the soggy
center." Tony Abbott shows you can win. So which is it -- go moderate or go bold? My
reading is that there's not as much conflict as initially appears. One reason
is that the analogies go only so far.
Galston and Kamarck surely understand that
Republicans aren't in as bad shape as Democrats were in 1989. Then Democrats
had lost the presidential popular vote in the last six elections by an average
of 10 percent. The corresponding figure for Republicans today is 4 percent. Moreover, Republicans have won House
majorities in eight of the last 10 elections, on platforms similar to that of
their presidential candidates. The
party faces challenges but not doom. And of course Australia is not the United
States. Abbott was helped by ferocious splits in the governing Labor Party.
Nothing similar is happening, yet, with America's Democrats.
I think the American Democrats and the British
Conservatives are offering similar advice in two respects. Run
on the issues of tomorrow, they say, not the issues of yesterday. Kamarck and
Galston note that many Republicans offer policies modeled on Ronald Reagan's.
But the country faces different problems today. In Australia, Abbott did not run on
the platform of 1996-2007 Liberal Prime Minister John Howard. He called for an
expensive parental leave program to encourage childbearing, for example. Most of all -- and here is the second point
of agreement -- the center-right victories in Australia and in Norway two days
later owe much to the unpopularity of center-left government policies. Abbott
promised to repeal Labor's carbon tax. Norway's Ema Solberg called for
business-friendly reforms to produce the economic growth necessary for an
expensive welfare state. There is no
shortage of unpopular Obama policies. Obamacare, for starters, is
unpopular and may be headed for a train wreck when it goes into effect next
month. Blocking the Keystone pipeline irritates most everyone except hard-line
environmentalists. Then there's -- James Carville's phrase -- the economy,
stupid. Big government isn't working as promised. Republicans need to present attractive policies that address future
needs. Good policy, more than ideological positioning, is the key to political
success.
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AR-15: Anti-Gun Narrative Blows Up In Face of CNN,
Liberal idiots will
always blame the gun instead of the murderer. And of
course, once we ban forks people won’t be fat. Tuesday’s New York Daily News cover story is nothing more than a
long-form editorial that attempts to make the AR-15 (a semiautomatic sport
rifle) the bad guy in Monday’s horrific Navy Yard shooting. Last night,
CNN attempted to do the same through blowhard Piers Morgan. But there is just
one problem: CNN and The Daily News are 100% wrong. The FBI has just confirmed that a shotgun and two pistols were
recovered, and that the “gunman was NOT armed with [an] AR-15.” Tuesday
morning’s Daily News cover hysterically blared, “Same Gun Different Slay.”
Inside, Mike Lupica continued the blare: This time the shooter is reported to
be a Navy reservist named Aaron Alexis and when he is shot dead by law
enforcement, taken out before he can put a gun to his own head the way Lanza
did, he has his light, handy assault weapon with him, and a semiautomatic
pistol, and a shotgun. But even if the shooter had used a semiautomatic rifle
(which we now know he didn’t), it would have been one he took from a security
guard during the rampage. Maybe the
Daily News didn’t get it wrong; maybe Lupica and company are so far over the
edge that they are now calling for the American military to be disarmed?
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