Freedom Line Blog

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CST)/5:00 pm (EST):  William Doyle, co-author with late Chris Kyle of “American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms;”

4:30 (CST)/5:30 (EST): Aron Mujumdar, Professor, Florida Coastal School of Law: Presidential Power and the Obama Imperial Presidency;  

5:00 (CST)/6:00 pm (EST): Scott F. Langmack, CEO and Founder of BlueChipExec.com: “The Fast Track to your Ideal Job;’ and

5:30 (CST)/6:30 pm (EST): Matt Mayer, Visiting Fellow, Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation: Role of Local Governments in Immigration Reform.

 Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

John Bolton has a characteristically clear-minded op-ed just out in the Wall Street Journal about Russia’s antagonistic position vis-a-vis our interests in Syria. Quoth the former UN Ambassador:

Since Syria’s civil war began, Mr. Obama has insisted, contrary to fact, that the U.S. and Russia have a common interest in resolving the crisis and stabilizing the Middle East. Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent efforts to secure Russian co-sponsorship of a peace conference, at which Washington will push for Assad’s ouster, reflect Mr. Obama’s illusion.

The objective evidence consistently demonstrates that Russia has no interest whatever in eliminating its only remaining Arab ally. Moscow’s military and financial assistance to Damascus continues undiminished, along with its hold on the Cold War-era Tartus naval base, strategically positioned on Syria’s Mediterranean coast—but now facing only a phantom U.S. Sixth Fleet. Despite the hoopla surrounding the announcement of the proposed peace talks, their starting date, attendees, agenda and prospects all remain uncertain.

Most dramatically, Russia last month reaffirmed its commitment to deliver sophisticated S-300 air-defense missile systems to Assad. Although Israeli leaders have played down the sale’s significance, this combination of advanced radars and missiles, which can defeat any non-stealthy aircraft (and Israel does not now have stealth planes), could change the strategic balance in Syria as well as in Lebanon and Iran—to Israel’s detriment and ours.

These are not, needless to say the actions of a friend.

Scratch the surface a bit and you’ll see the folly not only of the Obama Administration’s Russian “reset” policy, but also of every one of our “peace through vacuous niceties” diplomatic endeavors, whether in the former Soviet Union, China, or the Muslim world.

Our differences are not the product of misunderstandings. All international conflict does not stem from a global game of telephone gone horribly wrong. States and certain non-state actors (such as terrorists) rationally pursue their interests, which are defined both in material terms (economic advantage, balance of power considerations) and ideological ones. If those interests are fundamentally incompatible, no measure of sweet reason will make them otherwise. In the case of Russia, which defines one of its imperatives as checking American power wherever it can, that is precisely the case.

Thanks to a little-noticed Republican amendment, ObamaCare puts Members of Congress and their staffers under the same insurance rate-shock being anticipated by the private sector.

Reporting in Politico gives a useful summary:

“Currently, aides and lawmakers receive their health care under the generous Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. The government subsidizes upward of 75 percent of the premiums for the health insurance plans. In 2014, most Capitol Hill aides and lawmakers are expected to be put onto those exchanges, and there has been no guidance whether the government will subsidize those premiums. This is expected to cause a steep spike in health insurance costs.”

The source of the heartburn is the Grassley Amendment. Added to ObamaCare in 2010 during Senate debate, the amendment requires aides and lawmakers to use insurance plans that are either “created” by the law or “offered through an exchange.”

Partisans on both sides agree that the text and the intent of the amendment ensure that Congress and its employees will be subject to the same regulatory pain ObamaCare imposes on everyone else.

So, unless the feds carve out an exemption for Congress, there could be a sudden burst of retirements as staff members try to avoid paying higher premiums on lower incomes than they could get in the private sector.

If that happens, the coming brain drain in Congress will negatively impact the quality of work it produces. But unlike every other employer in America, the national legislature has only itself to blame.

In an interview with CFIF, Sally Pipes, President and CEO, and Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies, at the Pacific Research Institute, discusses why the ObamaCare Insurance Exchange Train is already coming off the rails and why this train wreck will be riddled with delays, wasteful spending and cost overruns.

Listen to the interview here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry is once again visiting Democratic strongholds in an attempt to lure businesses to relocate to the Lone Star State.

Perry is set to meet with business groups in New York and Connecticut, reports National Public Radio. Previously, Perry extolled his state’s low-tax, light-regulation approach in California and Illinois.

But Perry’s initiative is more than just a series of speeches and photo-ops. His moves are coordinated with the work of TexasOne, a coalition of chambers of commerce and corporations funding a $1 million advertising campaign in the targeted states.

YouTube ads like “Texas is Calling” tout the state’s nine consecutive years ranked #1 for business, hosting the world’s largest medical center and welcoming 1,400 new residents a day.

With states like California, Illinois, New York and Connecticut ranking near the bottom in business-friendly taxes and regulations, it’s no wonder Perry sees an opportunity to let wealth creators in those states know there is an alternative.

If U.S. Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) ever need a Democratic endorsement of their conservative bona fides, they couldn’t do better than Vice President Joe Biden’s comment the other day at a Massachusetts fundraiser.

Speaking off-the-cuff, Biden told the audience that “the last thing in the world we need now is someone who will go down to the United States Senate and support Ted Cruz, support the new senator from Kentucky,” meaning Rand Paul.

Apparently, the Senators were the two most cited reasons given when Biden pressed Republicans in the chamber to support his and President Barack Obama’s push for stricter gun control laws.

Biden was surprised. “I actually said, ‘Are you kidding?’ These are two freshmen.”

Better yet, call them ‘reformers with results.’

One of the disappointments for many conservatives is to watch a Republican politician talk a good game, but then get co-opted into shirking principles in deference to the process and the allure of power in Washington, D.C.

If Cruz and Paul have been able to stiffen the spines of their Republican colleagues, then it sounds like the GOP caucus is getting more conservative as a result of their presence.

That’s quite a feat for two freshmen.

Just ask Joe Biden.

H/T: Washington Examiner

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Speaking at an America’s Future Foundation (AFF) gathering, Senator Ted Cruz stood up decisively for intellectual property (IP) rights in America.  Whereas too many contemporary political figures either falsely malign IP protections or equivocate while trying to please everyone, Sen. Cruz advocated more vigorous enforcement of IP, highlighted IP’s unique role in America becoming the most innovative and prosperous society in human history, described the incentive it provides for small businesses (which create most new jobs in America), detailed its importance in sparking desperately-needed economic growth and sounded the alarm regarding domestic and foreign IP theft.   In addition, he offered an interesting personal insight by describing his legal work as an attorney before the Supreme Court.

For good measure, Senator Cruz also took a nice swing at the misnamed Marketplace Fairness Act, the pernicious Internet sales tax legislation that somehow passed the Senate but fortunately appears doomed in the House.  He’s looking like a gem.

On the day Hillary Clinton joins Twitter, the Washington Post reports that her popularity is dipping as Independents turn a bit sour on the former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and First Lady.

A big factor affecting the public’s perception of Clinton is the Benghazi scandal that helped to accelerate her exit from office. Because of her defiant testimony in the aftermath of the terrorist-led killings of four Americans, congressional investigators have been laying the groundwork to summon her to Capitol Hill to clarify her remarks, and this time as a private citizen.

A private citizen with an eye toward running for President of the United States in 2016, that is. So far, Clinton has been able to avoid culpability for Benghazi, in part because the fiasco seems like anomaly in an otherwise scandal-free tenure at State.

But as of today, that perception may be changing. Radically.

CBS News is reporting that “Uncovered documents show the U.S. State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal behavior ranging from sexual assaults to an underground drug ring.”

An internal investigation now made public cites examples of an ambassador being allowed to continue at his post despite deliberately losing his security detail “to solicit sexual favors from prostitutes,” and several instances where investigators “were simply told to back off investigations of high-ranking State Department members.”

If this story gets legs – and with all the attention paid to whistleblowers at the moment, I expect it will – it looks like the Hillary 2016 speculation will first have to overcome revelations of gross mismanagement that enabled criminal behavior and exposed four Americans to a deadly, and avoidable, attack.

Not exactly the profile of a future president.

Here’s a troubling prospect: Americans who want to assert their rights of religious conscience will have to go through the famously scrupulous Internal Revenue Service to do so. Ashley E. McGuire writing in the Weekly Standard:

On August 1, the one-year “safe harbor” for religious charities objecting to provisions of Obamacare will end. Starting then, these nonprofit employers will be forced to violate their religious beliefs or pay large fines. In charge of collecting the fines will be our recently newsworthy friends at the Internal Revenue Service.

… Faced with the public outcry, the government did allow nonexempt religious organizations​—​hospitals, universities, charities, and so on​—​a year to get over their scruples and figure out how to comply. That year ends on August 1, when another 30 or so lawsuits filed by objecting nonprofits will be activated. But now, enter stage left: the IRS.

The way the regulation is written, it is the IRS that determines whether an organization qualifies for full exemption from the HHS mandate. To qualify, an organization must be a nonprofit as described in section 6033(a)(1) and section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) or (iii) (oh, my!) of the amended Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and therefore exempt from filing Form 990, which most nonprofits must file annually.

The good news: in the short term, the IRS is likely to be so conscious of the extra scrutiny it’s under because of the scandal involving tea party groups that it applies an exceedingly light tough in dealing with organizations trying to gain exemption from the mandate. The bad news: wayward government agencies, like misbehaving children, have a tendency to straighten up and fly right only as long as they know they’re being observed.

Even if the IRS discharges this duty with as much objectivity as possible, however, it doesn’t alleviate the underlying problem. No bureaucrat — nor any politician, for that matter — should possess power so sweeping that they get to decide whether or not someone’s religious beliefs earn indulgence from the state. It’s government at its most intrusive. And it’s one more reason that the contraception mandate — and Obamacare with it — needs to be discarded.

A group of conservative House Republicans is readying an anti-ObamaCare messaging campaign to coordinate arguments against the controversial health law in the run-up to its debut in October.

The initiative aims to make criticisms of the law more mainstream.

“The goal of the House ObamaCare Accountability Project is to raise public awareness about ObamaCare’s impact on jobs, health costs and access to care. HOAP is a group of select House members who will supplement and echo the work being done by the House Committees of jurisdiction and all members of the House Republican Conference on this important issue,” a spokeswoman told Politico.

HOAP is being spearheaded by House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The effort includes 25 House GOP members drawn from across the country.

As far as I can tell, there’s no website or talking points available yet, but even just an announcement is a start in the right direction. Conservatives need to find a way to turn the public’s dissatisfaction into a movement for repeal. With the media in favor of the status quo, that means a messaging unit like this – that’s very good – is needed to get the conversation moving in the right direction.

In this week’s Liberty Update, we mark the fourth anniversary of the end of the last recession in June 2009, noting that the subsequent years have been the most dismal recovery since we began keeping records after World War II.  Today’s unemployment report only served to confirm that reality, as unemployment rose to 7.6% and we only added 175,000 net jobs, which is just treading water.

In an excellent commentary entitled “These Are the Most Important Numbers from the Latest Jobs Report,” American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain brilliantly captures the lackluster nature of today’s release.  Setting aside the headline 7.6% and 175,000 numbers, he says, “I encourage you to pay attention to three other numbers which, to my mind, are much more important than 7.6 and 175,000.  They are 2.4, 4.4., and 0.4.”

“We still have 2.4 million fewer jobs than when the recession officially began 66 months ago. Relative to previous downturns, this performance is quite bad.

We still have 4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer. This is a very large number. Outside this downturn, the previous post-war record was under 3 million, back in the 1980s. Over 37% of the total unemployed are long-term unemployed. The previous post-war record, also back in the 1980s, was a comparatively low 26%.

When the Great Recession began in December 2007, 62.7% of the working-age population was employed; today it is a staggeringly lower 58.6%. The share of the working-age population with jobs has increased by only 0.4 percentage points since its low point in the official recovery. Though it doesn’t get much attention, many labor economists prefer the employment-to-population ratio as the best measure of the broad health of the labor market. That this measure has improved so little indicates that the economy is creating just a few more jobs than are needed to keep up with population growth. But this is not enough. We need to create enough jobs to handle the growth of the working-age population and to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. To put it simply, we are not succeeding.”

So more of the same.  The Obama Administration and its dwindling number of defenders will attempt to characterize today’s numbers in a positive light, but that’s simply not accurate.  A broad economic policy change toward the free-market principles that we know work is necessary, the sooner the better.

Readers know we’ve taken an interest in Eric Holder’s, at best, misleading testimony to Congress about his role in the James Rosen search warrant because, most likely, it’s the clearest evidence yet that the Attorney General should be removed from office.

But to find out whether Holder perjured himself, Congress needs to know all the facts. That means getting Holder to clarify his conflicting statements about whether he intended to prosecute Rosen as a criminal, or just allege the accusation as a smokescreen to get unprecedented – and unlawful – access to the Fox News reporter’s personal communications.

Holder made his misleading statement under oath on May 15. The Judiciary Committee gave him until the close of business yesterday (June 5) to clarify. With that deadline now passed, it’s up to House Republicans to make the next move. For the sake of the truth, it better be good.

Here’s a quick rule of thumb for the IRS scandal dogging the Obama Administration: things will only get worse. The most recent domino to fall: those claims that the abuse was quarantined to the agency’s Cincinnati office just don’t hold up. From the Wall Street Journal:

Two Internal Revenue Service employees in the agency’s Cincinnati office told congressional investigators that IRS officials in Washington helped direct the probe of tea-party groups that began in 2010.

Transcripts of the interviews, viewed Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, appear to contradict earlier statements by top IRS officials, who have blamed lower-level workers in Cincinnati.

Elizabeth Hofacre said her office in Cincinnati sought help from IRS officials in the Washington unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations after she started getting the tea-party cases in April 2010. Ms. Hofacre said Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, closely oversaw her work and suggested some of the questions asked applicants.

“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” she said, according to the transcripts.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. A low-level government employee is the most risk-averse creature on the planet. That doesn’t prevent them from being wildly incompetent or occasionally venal, but it’s not the stuff of which sweeping ideological crusaders are made. That tends to require direction from above. How far up the chain it goes remains an open question.

If you’re a member of the Obama Administration who’s engaged in some official malfeasance, now is the time to come clean. With the orgy of Administration-related scandals in the news right now, there’s a decent chance no one will notice. And if they do, they’ll likely be so numb to the pervasive impropriety that they’ll just ignore it and move on. That seems to be the thinking at the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suddenly decided to become a little more forthcoming yesterday. From the New York Times:

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed on Tuesday that she had made telephone calls to three companies regulated by her department and urged them to help a nonprofit group promote President Obama’s health care law.

She identified the companies as Johnson & Johnson, the drug maker; Ascension Health, a large Roman Catholic health care system; and Kaiser Permanente, the health insurance plan.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Ms. Sebelius said she did not explicitly ask the companies for money, but urged them to support the work of the nonprofit group, Enroll America.

The group, led by former Obama administration officials, is working with the White House to publicize the 2010 health care law and help uninsured people sign up for coverage.

Here’s the deal: News of the Secretary’s freelancing had already gone public a few weeks ago, but the defense at the time was that she had only solicited money from a couple of companies that weren’t regulated by HHS. Now she concedes that she was hitting up companies under her department’s jurisdiction but wants you to believe that it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Here’s the problem: Congress refused to fully fund an extensive PR campaign for Obamacare (as it should have — this is a government health program, not the rollout of a new SUV), leading a bunch of Obama flaks to create the aforementioned Enroll America. Now you have the HHS Secretary — who has the power to bring down the hammer on these companies — ever-so-gently suggesting that they “support the work” of Enroll. She could well be telling the truth about not explicitly asking them for money — because she wouldn’t have to. None of these companies need to be told outright that if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

The dissembling from HHS is bad enough, but it’s representative of a deeper problem. At every turn, Obamacare creates precisely this kind of nexus between government and the private sector. It’s an invitation to corruption. And it looks like the RSVPs are starting to come in.

So, will he or won’t be vote for his Gang of Eight’s version of comprehensive immigration reform?

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is starting to sound like a politician who knows he miscalculated on the public’s support for a legalization first approach to fixing America’s broken immigration system.

Consider these two statements from the Florida lawmaker as quoted by The Hill:

“There will have to be improvements [to the Gang’s bill],” Rubio said [after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved it without substantial changes]. “Because the good thing is the American people, the vast majority of them throughout the political spectrum, have clearly said that they are prepared to responsibly deal with those that are here illegally, but they are only willing to do so if we can take measures that ensure that this problem will never happen again in the future. And so, if we can make sure we put in place enforcement mechanisms and a guest worker program that ensures this will never happen again in the future, we’re going to have responsible immigration reform. And if we don’t have that, then we won’t have immigration reform.”

But on Monday of this week, Rubio is sounding a different tune when explaining to a constituent why reform couldn’t be piecemeal as Republicans in the House of Representatives want:

“I give you my word, that if this issue becomes one of those old-fashioned Washington issues where they start horse trading, one part of it for another part of it,” Rubio said in a video response to a constituent’s concern. “If each of these are not dealt with as separate issues even though they are dealt with in one bill, then I won’t be able to support that anymore.”
…
The problem with immigration though is that it is complex because it is all interwoven,” Rubio said. “It’s all related to each other. It’s literally impossible to do one part without doing the other.”

So, which is it? Is immigration reform as the Gang envisions it in need of major changes to make it acceptable to the House, or is it a done deal that can’t be amended?

I suspect the answer for Rubio is both. The Gang’s bill as-is does not secure the border first, and therefore – among many other serious problems – will be dead on arrival when it hits the House, as it should be. The problem for Rubio, though, is that he is one of the Gang members, making him a co-author of everything that’s in the bill.  To walk away from it now, without any big changes, would indicate that his real problem with the bill is that it’s not popular. What conservatives want instead is for him to oppose it because, as written, it’s wrong on the merits.

Personally, I like Marco Rubio and hope he can find an honorable way to disassociate himself from the Gang of Eight, so that he can be a Senate champion for immigration reform that puts security and enforcement before amnesty.

It’ll be tough, but it’s worth the effort.

The job of Republican strategists preparing for the next midterm election just got a lot easier. From Politico:

Scarred by years of Republican attacks over Obamacare, with more in store next year, Democrats have settled on an unlikely strategy for the 2014 midterms: Bring it on.

Party strategists believe that embracing the polarizing law — especially its more popular elements — is smarter politics than fleeing from it in the House elections. The new tack is a marked shift from 2010, when Republicans pointed to Obamacare as Exhibit A of Big Government run amok on their way to seizing the House from Democrats.

But the Democratic bear hug, reflecting a calculation it’s probably impossible to shed their association with the law even if they wanted to, is still a high-wire public relations act. The White House has consistently struggled with messaging on Obamacare, hoping the public would gain an appreciation for the health care makeover as its benefits became apparent. That never really happened, but Democrats seem to be banking that it finally will.

This at a time when 54 percent of the public opposes the law, 40 percent very strongly.

Democrats seem to be banking on the notion that they can run on the law’s benefits while being held blameless for its costs. It should be fun to watch that play out as the former continues to shrink while the latter spirals out of control.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CST)/5:00 pm (EST):  Romina Boccia, Assistant Director at Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation: Debt Limit;

4:30 (CST)/5:30 (EST): Ryan Young, Fellow in Regulatory Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Over-Regulation;

4:45 (CST)/5:45 pm (EST): Ashton Ellis, Contributing Editor at CFIF: Congress’ Right to Impeach Eric Holder;

5:00 (CST)/6:00 pm (EST): Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies: Immigration Reform; and

5:30 (CST)/6:30 pm (EST):  Open Mic

5:45 (CST)/6:45 pm (EST): Sally Pipes, President and CEO, Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute: ObamaCare’s Upcoming Train Wreck.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.