Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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Denali and the "I Don’t Give a Damn" Presidency Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, September 03 2015
Once you condition yourself to that way of thinking, once you’ve learned how to identify all of the left’s stock villains, it’s easy to see where the impetus for Denali comes from.

I’ve long held the minority viewpoint that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution — limiting the president to two terms in office — may well have been a mistake.

Yes, there’s no question that the executive branch is uniquely susceptible to consolidating power in a way that threatens the integrity of the Republic. That’s the best argument for putting a hard cap on presidential tenure.

But in insulating against the possibility of that species of unchecked presidential power, you create the certainty of another: Second-term presidents, never having to face the voters again, lose most of their incentives to respect public opinion.

If you want a textbook example of what happens when the president no longer has to mind the electorate, look no further than Barack Obama’s second term.

The president grants de facto amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants after repeatedly declaring that he doesn’t have the legal authority to do so.

He works up an inscrutable deal where Iran gets to inspect its own nuclear facilities, then tells Congress he’s not even going to submit it to them as a treaty.

He decides to go to war with coal producers and give the federal government dominion over the Internet, without ever bothering to get buy-in from the legislative branch.

And now he … renames a mountain?

Okay, the President’s latest exercise in unilateralism — decreeing that the federal government will officially begin calling Alaska’s Mount McKinley “Denali,” the name favored by natives — isn’t quite as sweeping as his past efforts. What it lacks in long-term consequences, however, it makes up for in sheer weirdness. Rechristening a mountain by executive fiat? It seems like the kind of thing you’d get from the eccentric ruler of some European microstate.

All of which invites some obvious questions: Why bother? Why even tend to such pedestrian concerns? Wasn’t it Obama, after all, who poked fun at the small-ball approach to politics that found Bill Clinton pushing for school uniforms? And now he’s spending the closing days of his presidency taking Wite-Out to a map of Alaska?

In truth, however, the McKinley/Denali affair fits the second term template quite nicely — if you understand what the president’s doing on the same terms that he does.

Here’s the essential point to grasp: To the progressive mind, “justice ” (however defined) is a superlative value. On the left, it doesn’t matter how many laws you flout or how many traditions you trample if the ultimate cause is noble. That’s why Obama — “an expert in constitutional law,” remember — could keep a straight face while promoting his executive actions with a campaign called “We Can’t Wait” despite the fact that the central message of the Constitution is “You Must Wait.’ If justice delayed is justice denied, why let a little something like the foundational law of the land get in the way?

Here’s the other important point: The progressive conception of justice almost always turns on notions of victim-hood. Consider the issues listed above from a liberal perspective.

Illegal immigration? Poor Hispanics are victims because they’re not allowed to share in the full fruits of American citizenship, never mind how they got here.

Iran’s nuclear program? Just a rational response to America’s exploitation of the Middle East. Pay no attention to that talk about the Twelfth Imam and the glories of being a martyr nation.

Coal producers or Internet providers? Fat cat businessmen who don’t care how much destruction they cause as long as profits stay high.

Once you condition yourself to that way of thinking, once you’ve learned how to identify all of the left’s stock villains, it’s easy to see where the impetus for Denali comes from. An indigenous people wanting to take the name of an old, dead white guy off a national environmental treasure? You’ve just found the ultimate liberal erogenous zone. 

In 2013, New York Times journalist Peter Baker reported that President Obama fantasized behind closed doors about “going Bulworth,” a reference to a 1998 film in which a U.S. senator played by Warren Beatty decides to drop the usual political equivocations and just do what he wants. That doesn’t feel like much of a fantasy these days.

Here’s what Americans need to get their heads around for the 16 months or so that Barack Obama has left in office. The president doesn’t give a damn what Congress thinks. He doesn’t give a damn what the courts think. He doesn’t give a damn what Democratic presidential candidates think. And he sure as hell doesn’t give a damn what you think. And here’s the scary part: There’s not a whole lot anyone can do about it.

The next 16 months may prove to be something of a progressive kamikaze mission. Plan accordingly

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