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 18, 2024 • 03:11 PM

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On ObamaCare, the President Gives Up Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, February 13 2014
ObamaCare was one big con. And now that the president has gotten his way, the country is left holding the bag...

There are a number of ways to look at Monday’s announcement that the Treasury Department is going to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate — requiring firms to provide health insurance for their employees — until 2016 for companies with between 50 and 99 employees.

You can consider it raw politics, a shameless exercise in taking a vital issue off the table for this year’s midterm elections, where Democrats are already looking embattled.

You can look at it as further evidence of this Administration’s lawlessness, another major change to the law enacted without consultation with — much less the consent of — Congress.

Or you can look at it this way: Barack Obama has now given up on his signature policy initiative.

What’s noteworthy about the 2016 date isn’t just that it puts the mandate at arm’s length from the upcoming elections; it’s also that it places it so late in Obama’s tenure — in his eighth year, when his leverage with Congress will be virtually non-existent — that it essentially announces that the president is content to leave this mess for his successor to clean up.

That’s pretty audacious coming from a guy who attacked Mitt Romney for supposedly stripping companies for parts and leaving them for dead once he had extracted what he had wanted from them. Is that less of a sin when you’re doing it to an entire country?

In his 2009 inaugural address, Obama pronounced, “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.” Count his spirit unsatisfied then.

What’s particularly ironic about this call to arms at the distance of five years is the audacity of the phrase “new era of responsibility.” You don’t have to have agreed with the war in Iraq — for that matter, you don’t even have to have liked George W. Bush — to recognize that the second term of Obama’s predecessor was an object lesson in political responsibility.

With the situation in Iraq rapidly deteriorating by the end of Bush’s tenure, he announced The Surge in 2007 — a time when, as a lame-duck president just coming off a bruising rebuke in the mid-term elections, his political capital was nearly non-existent. Two of the primary reasons for that decision: Bush wanted to see a cause he believed in through to the finish and he didn’t want to leave a mess for his successor.

At the time, this was considered politically baffling. What president, with his approval ratings plummeting and his time in office concluding, doubles down on the policy that’s driving his unpopularity? The answer: one who believes he’s doing so in the service of a just cause. The modern, poll-driven era has conditioned us to react to such consistency with shock, but it’s exactly what we should expect from anyone who possesses the daunting responsibility of the presidency.

Now, consider Obama by comparison. He regarded his vision of healthcare reform as too sacrosanct to accept a watered-down initiative like the one suggested by his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. He considered it too important to accommodate Republican objections, pushing it through on a party-line vote despite the divisions it was engendering in the country. He thought it so untouchable that he scoffed at Republican pleas to delay its implementation last fall, even though he knew he was only days away from unveiling what will surely go down as one of the great public policy failures in American history.

With that level of commitment, you’d think he’d place some value on getting the policy right, on not leaving ObamaCare as a permanent albatross around the neck of his presidency. Yet, it’s now clearer than ever that he’s going to depart for a retirement of best-selling books and highly paid speeches without so much as lifting a finger to repair the damage wrought by a policy that was supposed to be the centerpiece of his legacy.

ObamaCare was one big con. And now that the president has gotten his way, the country is left holding the bag, wondering whatever happened to that charming fellow who swept us off our feet just a few years ago. Con men are always smart enough to get out of town before the mark figures out what’s happened.

When Obama jets off for a tony precinct in Chicago or a beach in Hawaii, the rest of us will be left sorting through the wreckage of health care reform. A new era of responsibility indeed.

Notable Quote   
 
"It's a rematch.President Biden and former President Trump each hit a key marker last week, clinching enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of their respective party.The outcome of the general election will come down to a handful of states, as usual.The map maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ lists seven contests as toss-ups."Read the entire article here.…[more]
 
 
— Niall Stanage, The Hill
 
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