Freedom Line Blog

Tim had a great post explaining why the 4th Circuit’s dismissal of the two Obamacare lawsuits is not all that big a deal. He’s absolutely right, in terms of ultimate effects. At the American Spectator (in the first of my three unrelated, half-formed thoughts), I explain why on legal grounds the rulings are an absolute outrage anyway, even though, as Tim said, they don’t really harm the overall argument against the individual mandate as the issue moves inexorably toward the Supreme Court.

As I explained:

The grounds on which the judges made the decision are so ludicrous as to be intellectually bankrupt.

Against all reasonable evidence and against the rulings of every other court, both liberal- and conservative-dominated, that has considered the issue, this Fourth Circuit panel concluded that the mandate actually operates as a “tax.” Congress has broader powers to tax than it does merely to regulate; thus, legal challenges to a tax face a higher bar. Because these obstreperous judges say it is a tax that hasn’t actually been imposed yet (it has been passed by Congress but not yet implemented), they say the university has suffered no harm yet and thus can’t sue. The absurdity is that the mandate is in no way a tax. By both definition and implementation, it imposed no tax but instead a penalty for non-compliance. President Obama himself repeatedly argued in public that it wasn’t a tax. Congress didn’t call it a tax. And every other court — at least four district courts and two appeals courts — that has analyzed this claim has made mincemeat of the administration’s contention that it is a tax. Most of those courts haven’t just rejected the claim; they have eviscerated it.

As I said on my radio show last night (in the introductory 15 minutes, before I interviewed Rick Santorum), this is why the fights over judges are so important.  Bad judges are an affront to constitutional republicanism. And this ruling by three bad, liberal judges is an abomination.

In an interview with CFIF’s Quin Hillyer, Eric Eversole, executive director of the Military Voter Protection Project, discusses the continuing low percentage of overseas military personnel who actually cast and have their ballots counted.

Listen to the interview here.

Our friends at Americans for Tax Reform compiled this helpful list of the 21 new or higher taxes President Barack Obama has signed into law since being sworn into office.  Of these, 20 come from ObamaCare.

Remember, try to laugh while you cry.

There’s been quite a bit of media buzz surrounding the recently announced bankruptcy of Solyndra, the California solar panel company that couldn’t turn a profit even after a $535 million loan from the federal government.

But what started out as Exhibit A in the case against subsidizing green jobs into existence has morphed into the latest scandal engulfing the Obama Administration.  At issue is a suspicious connection between a Solyndra investor’s work as a bundler for the Obama campaign and the sweetheart loan given to the company.

On Wednesday, the FBI raided Solyndra’s Fremont, California headquarters, and Republicans are promising increased scrutiny.  It would be bad enough if there is a pay-to-play scandal, but it’s even worse financially since the failure of Solyndra is both corrupt and incompetent.

Today, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against challenges of ObamaCare by Virginia and Liberty University.

For several reasons, however, today’s ruling should be taken with a Jimmy Buffet-sized shaker of salt.  First, the ruling itself did not address the substantive merits or the primary Constitutional claim that ObamaCare exceeds the authority permitted by the interstate commerce clause.  Instead, the judges ruled that neither Virginia nor Liberty possessed procedural “standing,” the ability to demonstrate harm that has occurred or may imminently occur.  That is very different than a ruling that ObamaCare itself passes Constitutional muster, and at any rate is subject to change down the road as ObamaCare’s provisions are more fully implemented.  Second, two of the judges who ruled today were appointed by Barack Obama himself, and the other by Bill Clinton.  In the Fourth Circuit as a whole, however, there is an even split with seven judges appointed by Republican presidents and seven appointed by Democrats.  So the ideological makeup at an en banc hearing will be very different.  Third, the question of standing is not one within the unique expertise or authority of these three particular judges.  Quite the contrary, standing is an issue within the authority of every court in every case, because it is a requisite to move forward with any lawsuit in the first instance.  Accordingly, today’s particular ruling is at odds with not only the lower court’s standing determination, but that of the Eleventh Circuit in its recent ruling overturning ObamaCare.  Fourth, this particular panel’s decision wasn’t a surprise, as its line of questioning in May focused on the issue of standing, rather than the merits of ObamaCare.

In other words, the immediate overarching theme is that today’s ruling is not a game-changer, and certainly not a significant “W” for ObamaCare as it continues its inevitable course toward the United States Supreme Court.  Whether through the Supreme Court or through the next Congress, ObamaCare will be defeated.

You can listen in here, from 9-10 Eastern time. Other presidential candidates coming soon.

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.

No, not Joe McCarthy. Andrew McCarthy. In an absolute tour de force at the New Criterion magazine, McCarthy — the prosecutor who put the parking lot bombers of the World Trade Center (1993) in jail — outlines the manifold abuses of law of Barack Obama and his Justice Department consiglieres, especially Attorney General Eric Holder. In doing so, he broadens and deepens and updates a piece I did last fall for The American Spectator — but with an extra dose of authoritativeness I could not match.

Writes McCarthy:

In flagrant violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the Department of Justice now practices racial discrimination in enforcing, and in choosing not to enforce, the federal civil rights statutes. These laws, enacted to safeguard our basic liberties, are not invoked when the victims are white and the lawbreakers are black. The most brazen example of this noxious policy—but far from the only one—is the Department of Justice’s astounding decision to drop a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party even though Justice had already won the case.

As McCarthy explains, for Obama and his Alinskyite allies,

Lawfulness and lawlessness, thuggishness and regular politics—we’re not to divine any moral or ethical differences. They are just different “approaches” to empowerment. They only “seem” to be “divergent.” It may be important to maintain the veneer of respect for legal processes, but it is just as legitimate to stretch or break the rules whenever necessary to achieve the desired outcome—social justice being a higher form of legitimacy than society’s rule of law. Separatism, menacing, and civil disobedience: none of these is beyond the pale; they are simply choices on the hard power menu Obama “bridges” with soft power (i.e., the system’s mundane legal and political processes).

Again, read the whole thing.  Great stuff. Scary, but oh-so-important for us to understand what we’re facing in the Oval Office.

I’ve taken my share of shots at GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney for all the usual conservative misgivings about his candidacy.  And while this post is in no way an endorsement of him or his campaign, I do think it worth sharing a link from the Boston Globe to Romney’s newly unveiled economic plan.

Thankfully, it’s all about how to achieve economic growth.  Quin mentioned previously that Rick Santorum, one of Romney’s rivals for the nomination, also has some good ideas.  As conservatives get down to the business of eyeballing the candidates, we’d better get as informed as we can be.  Republican or Democrat, we can’t make another presidential level mistake.

David Codrea, the blogger who originally broke the “Gunrunner” scandal at ATF, reports that another guns-to-criminals scheme is sprouting up in Indiana.

There, a gun seller defended himself recently against an FBI demand for information about guns sold to American crime gangs with all-too-familiar response: I was just following ATF’s guidelines.

That’s right, according to Codrea’s extensive documentation there is now another instance of ATF deliberately violating gun control laws to let weapons fall into criminal hands in the hopes of catching bigger criminal fish.  And how’s this for oversight: when the FBI was told the Indiana gun dealer was working with ATF, the FBI promised to remove the seller from any further investigation.

Add the American Midwest to the list of ATF scandals including Phoenix, AZ, (Project Gunrunner, Operation Fast & Furious) and Tampa, FL (Operation Castaway).

Last week the Acting ATF director was reassigned and the Arizona U.S. Attorney abruptly resigned.  With a third front opening up, how much longer can U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder – the man charged with oversight of ATF – keep his job?

H/T: Michelle Malkin

Yes, I have a weekly radio show, and it can be listened to nationally. I’ll have the first in a series of presidential candidates as guests this Thursday night, with Rick Santorum being welcomed to Hillyer Time. Details here.

At the American Spectator, I provide a small, informed-third-party view of Dick Cheney’s persona, while clearly taking his side vs. Colin Powell. What I didn’t write there, because I handed it in before last night, was that all of the remembrances of 9/11 are bringing into stark relief just how fortunate we were to have Cheney around on that day. I watched a Smithsonian TV special on 9/11 last night, featuring extensive interviews with Cheney (among dozens of others, of course), and it was striking just how essential it was to have Cheney’s good judgment and steady hand in the White House while President Bush was airborne for so many hours. A good man and a true statesman, Dick Cheney served his country well. I’m glad his book is receiving so much attention.

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.

Zero.  That’s the number of net jobs created in America last month according to the Labor Department’s monthly update, and the unemployment rate remained at 9.1%.

We are now more than two years since the recession officially ended in June 2009, and at the stage where the Obama Administration predicted that his trillion-dollar deficit spending “stimulus” would reduce unemployment to approximately 6% after topping out at 8% all the way back in the fall of 2009.  Instead, we suffered a post-war record number of months over 9%, and it continues to fester there.  By way of background, keep in mind that economists generally agree that a minimum of 150,000 to 200,000 jobs must be added to the American economy each month just to keep pace with natural population growth.  Also consider that economists had forecast a rise of somewhere near 100,000 jobs for July.

In contrast, in the same 30-month period following the effective date of President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in January 1983, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.4%.  We know what economic policies actually work.   What hath the opposite approach wrought?

MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe, a pasty white pale-skinned nothingburger if there ever were one, just doesn’t get it.  Like eleventy-umpteen squadrillion feeble-minded liberals before him, he seems to be so focused on President Barack Obama’s skin color that he thinks nobody else could possibly be motivated by anything other than a reaction to said skin color. The criticism of Obama’s nakedly transparent effort to upstage the Republican debate, said Wolffe, is nothing other than yet another example of how conservatives disrespect Obama just because he happens to be a shade darker — on some days — than John Boehner. Frankly, methinks Wolffe suffers from pigmentation envy. But no matter. As one who has repeatedly fought the good fight against white racists (oh, PLEASE, Mr. Wolffe, pretty please with sugar on top, challenge me on that one), I think I can safely say that the criticism of Obama would be the same even if Obama were a whiter shade of pale than the Procul Harum-inspired Mr. Wolffe himself.

Or has Mr. Wolffe not noticed that conservatives were equally critical of Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Dingy Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Frank Church, George McGovern, and Tom Hayden? Actually, he’s on to us: We know their secrets: Kennedy, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Church, McGovern and Hayden all are secret bearers of Negroid blood, which is why we oppose their politics. How did Wolffe figure out that we had figured out the Kennedy-Pelosi gang’s dark secret?!?

For the record, we are rather less than enamored of Mr. Obama not because he has African blood, but because he is arrogant, rude, self-absorbed, self-referential, condescending, leftist, Alinskyite, dishonest, incompetent, petty, peevish, unaccomplished, demagogic, and radical. He is the single worst president we’ve ever had, including Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan.

Let’s see Mr. Wolffe skip the light fandango and turn cartwheels across the floor about that list of Obama’s non-skin-related defects.