Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.
That’s the lead of a new report out by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) documenting what he argues are more than 75 legally suspect executive actions and “other abuses of power” by the Obama Administration.
The report, entitled The Legal Limit Report #4: The Obama Administration’s Abuse of Power, was first obtained by The Daily Caller and can be viewed below:
In an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that aired on Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama declared that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” with regard to the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups.
The American people are not buying it.
According to a Fox News poll released last week, a whopping 64 percent of registered voters, including a majority of Democrats, think the targeting scandal does suggest corruption at the IRS. A mere 27 percent don’t view the IRS’s targeting as corrupt.
When questioned about whether Congress should continue to investigate the IRS scandal, an even greater majority says “Yes!”
Majorities of Republicans (83 percent), independents (72 percent) and Democrats (60 percent) agree lawmakers should persist until they ‘feel they know the truth.’
CFIF’s Renee Giachino explains how President Obama’s push for higher taxes, bigger government and expanded welfare programs is the wrong approach to help the greatest number of people climb the economic ladder.
As we anticipated in last week’s Liberty Update, the U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will hear legal challenges to ObamaCare this term. As we also noted in that commentary, the issue broadly boils down to whether an explicit provision of the Constitution will be rendered meaningless and effectively read out of the document itself.
That is not hyperbole. Our Founding Fathers didn’t randomly insert provisions into the Constitution for no reason whatsoever. Rather, they crafted that document to design a federal government of limited, enumerated powers and to safeguard individual freedom to the greatest extent possible. Accordingly, they intentionally included the Commerce Clause of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution to empower Congress “To regulate Commerce with Foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” ObamaCare, however, does not merely “regulate commerce among the several states.” Rather, it compels commercial activity from every citizen, and punishes inactivity on the part of any individual.
Anyone asserting ObamaCare’s validity must therefore answer this question: If the Commerce Clause somehow permits forced commercial activity and prosecution of inactivity, what possible hypothetical federal mandate would it not permit? Such a result would void a specific clause within the text of the Constitution because no limiting principle would remain. That, in turn, would mean that no other provision remains safe in such a brave new world.
Hopefully, at least five Justices respect the Constitution enough to not remove yet another thread from its fabric. Should the Court fail, however, the fight will not be finished. The job will simply fall upon us as individual citizens to effectuate the individual freedoms that too few elected and appointed officials seem to respect.
This morning, the Labor Department announced that the U.S. unemployment rate climbed again to 9.1% this month, up from 9.0% in April. Just as alarmingly, the net number of jobs created was only 54,000, down from 232,000 in April. In addition to deteriorating from the previous month, both numbers fell well below the expectations of economists, who had anticipated a decline in the unemployment rate to 8.9%, and 160,000 net new jobs. This also means that in the 27 months since Obama signed his unprecedented government spending “stimulus,” unemployment has only climbed from 8.2% to 9.1%, even though the Administration projected that he would have it down to 6.5% by now. By way of comparison, in the same 27 months following the effective date of President Reagan’s tax cuts in January 1983, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.3%. The facts speak volumes.
Current commentary on the 2012 presidential race, including here at CFIF, centers primarily on the strength of the germinating Republican field. The more Barack Obama weakens between now and November 2012, however, the easier the task for whoever emerges from the GOP race. On that note, two new polls should have Team Obama sweating. In the first, Rasmussen reports that Obama only leads “Generic Republican” by one point this week. With most discussion of that generic Republican field focusing on its supposed weakness, that is significant. In the second, CNN reports that 48% of respondents state Obama’s presidency has been a failure to date, while only 47% rate it successful. The fact that CNN polled all adults, rather than registered voters or likely voters, is all the more reason for him to worry.
Observers like Charles Krauthammer are correct: Barack Obama’s partisan budget attack this week was a “disgrace.” Almost every sentence was tawdry, caustic or simply dishonest.
One suggestion early in Obama’s speech stood out because it is so easily refuted by simple numbers. Namely, his latest attempt to scapegoat the Bush Administration and portray his own record deficits as somehow attributable to it:
We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -– but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -– tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade. To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.”
But take a look at the actual historical deficit data, with particular attention to 2007, which was the last year under a Republican Congress and White House. That year’s deficit came in at $161 billion, which is one-tenth the size of Obama’s projected record $1.65 trillion 2011 deficit. That 2007 deficit was also down from $378 billion in 2003, when the tax cuts, Iraq invasion and drug benefit occurred. In his usual straw-man manner of argumentation, Obama mocked those who claim we can reduce our debt by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” but what better way to characterize his latest un-presidential harangue?
Shouldn’t America ensure that its military personnel and their families continue to receive paychecks, regardless of whether budget negotiations result in a deal or a federal shutdown? Barack Obama apparently doesn’t think so.
As bargaining continued yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R – Ohio) introduced legislation that would keep the government open one additional week and maintain military funding through the end of 2011 so that members of the armed forces would continue to be paid. The House quickly passed that bill, including 15 Democratic votes. Obama, however, grotesquely promised a veto, bizarrely labeling it a “distraction.”
Frankly, this entire debate wouldn’t be necessary if the preceding Congress overwhelmingly controlled by Obama’s own party had simply passed a 2011 budget. But for the first time since the inception of the Budget Act, they simply abdicated that basic responsibility. Regardless, our military is stretched thin across the globe, and many families live paycheck-to-paycheck. This obviously isn’t of paramount concern to a president who clearly seems to welcome a government shutdown.
This is one of the most shameful and pathetic episodes in an already shoddy presidency.
Yesterday, we noted that Obama’s 2012 reelection odds may not be as high as many currently assume, especially with even higher inflation, gas prices and international chaos on the horizon. Recalling 1991 and the supposedly invincible President George H. W. Bush, Byron York makes the same point with a brilliant summary quote:
Back in 1991, the pundits discussed how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job-approval rating of 90 percent. Now, they’re talking about how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job approval rating of 47 percent.”
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