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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Democrats Close the Door on Sanity Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, February 10 2011
Two years after Barack Obama’s election supposedly heralded the genesis of a new Democratic era – and only three months after that era abruptly ended with the midterm elections – the main institution devoted to developing Democratic policies palatable to a center-right nation is boarding its windows.

It may seem like just yesterday, but it’s now been some years since the Democratic Party – after suffering from years in the political wilderness – reemerged with bold new ideas, a charismatic leader and a compelling message that promised to lead the nation out of the economic doldrums of the Bush years. In fact, it’s probably been longer than you think – the year was 1992.
 
When Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush for the presidency that year, the victory fell far short of the sweeping mandate that Barack Obama received in 2008. But it was a sea change for the Democrats no less. Having lost five of the past six presidential elections, the fact that Clinton only won the 1992 contest with a plurality of the vote did little to temper the party’s enthusiasm. They were embarking on a bold new era.
 
In fact, Clinton represented a decisive break from the ideological drift that had beset the party for the previous two decades. Beginning with George McGovern in 1972, Democrats had nominated a series of northern liberals (McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis) for the presidency. Each had given into the depravations of the New Left that was increasingly acting as the party’s ideological driver – they were social liberals who embraced tax and spend economic policies, an increasingly powerful and centralized federal government and weakness in foreign affairs. The one candidate who didn’t fit the biographical narrative – the southern born-again Christian Jimmy Carter – managed to win the 1976 presidential election. But his eventual capitulation to many of those same ideological perversities – compounded by his fecklessness as an executive – sent him back to Plains, Georgia after one term in office.
 
It fell to Clinton to right this listing ship. He started with many of the same advantages of narrative as Carter: he was a southerner, born into a humble family and able to apply the common touch without seeming either insincerely contrived or sincerely provincial. But he did Carter one better (and ensured himself a second term in the process) by also altering his governing style to fit the reality of a nation whose political culture had been gravitationally pulled to the right by the Reagan years. Apart from early missteps on health care and guns in his basket case first two years, Clinton recognized that the only way a Democrat could succeed in that new political environment was to assimilate its instincts within the Democratic Party.
 
As a result, Clinton broke with Democratic orthodoxy repeatedly – sometimes on substance, sometimes merely through tonal shifts. Thus did he sign the North American Free Trade Agreement, a major triumph for free market advocates. Thus did he capitulate to welfare reform, balance the budget, and launch military actions in Europe and Africa. Thus did he sign the biggest federal crime bill in history. And thus did he famously declare, “The era of big government is over.” Many of these accomplishments would have been impossible without the substantial pressures of a Republican Congress, but in the end it was still Clinton’s name that was on them.
 
Yet while Clinton has gotten most of the subsequent kudos, far fewer plaudits have been directed toward the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist organization that provided the intellectual ammunition for much of the Democratic renaissance. So unappreciated was the DLC, in fact, that it announced earlier this week that it is closing its doors.
 
The irony couldn’t be richer. Two years after Barack Obama’s election supposedly heralded the genesis of a new Democratic era – and only three months after that era abruptly ended with the midterm elections – the main institution devoted to developing Democratic policies palatable to a center-right nation is boarding its windows.
 
Like Carter before him, Obama was able to sidestep the fact that he was an entirely orthodox liberal because he presented a compelling personal narrative that offered a contrast to an unpopular administration. And like Clinton, he has now been faced with the reality that style can trump substance much more easily at the ballot box than in the White House.
 
Pundits across the nation are telling us that Obama has internalized that lesson and that he is making a shift to the center with aplomb equal to Clinton’s. If that were true, however, would the most notable organization responsible for generating centrist Democratic ideas be turning the lights out? Probably not. And that’s something Obama should consider unless he wants to have a similar experience with the moving vans in two years’ time.

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