Will the American Voter Commit America’s Suicide Re-electing Obama and His Promises to His Entitled?

4 MONTHS TO DEFUSE THE OBAMACARE TIME BOMB! 

by Kevin O”Brien   at the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, political conservatives have been debating among themselves whether they’ve been handed a ghastly defeat or a golden opportunity.

There’s truth in both assessments.

In voting with the court’s leftists, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that Obamacare met the letter of enough law to stand, strongly implied that he didn’t much care for it as policy and tossed back into the political arena the question of whether America should live by it.

The ruling was a ghastly short-term defeat for the cause of individual liberty and limited government.

Whether it actually establishes a limit for the elasticity of the Commerce Clause, only time and future court decisions will tell.

It certainly confirmed conservatives’ dire suspicions that Congress has unlimited power to affect the behavior of individuals through the use of coercive tax laws.

Coercive tax policy is what modern government does. That’s why the federal tax code is 75,000 pages long. Take out all of the rewards for government-approved behavior and the punishments for things the government discourages, and you could fit the whole thing on the back of an envelope.

But thanks to Roberts’ clarification, at least those who favor limited activity by a limited government know what they’re up against — and know that help won’t be coming from the judiciary.

There will be no Supreme Court shortcuts to fixing the tax code, just as there will be none to ridding the nation of Obamacare.

The two intersect, of course. Obamacare is a tax — actually, a very large, very coercive series of taxes that will grow only more coercive as federal bureaucrats and successive Congresses spin a denser, wider web of federal control.

Obamacare is also a lie — a series of cynical cons: Obamacare will reduce health care costs; it’s doing the opposite and will continue to. It will cover everyone; not until it inevitably morphs into single-payer. You can keep your doctor; oops, never mind. There won’t be rationing; yeah, right — a government that ran out of money $15.7 trillion ago will buy you whatever medical care you need.

But the judiciary is concerned with legalities, not lies.

And assuming Roberts actually believes his own ruling, all he could do was to tell us that the Constitution permits what Congress has done and leave it for us to decide whether to undo it.

The people’s decision on repeal will be indirect — this is a republic, not a democracy — but at least the issue as voters judge those running to represent them will be clear and the choice will be stark: No politician should be allowed to leave any doubt in the minds of voters about which way he or she will jump.

Important though health care policy may be, deeper issues are afoot, too.

One of those issues is purely political: If Obamacare is not repealed, the left’s dream comes true. Their political party gains a hold on the federal government that, until catastrophe strikes, could well prove unbreakable.

On the one hand, the Republicans can never be returned to power, the Democrats will say, because “they will take your health care away.”

On the other hand, if you want to keep your health care, you’ll have to live within the rules of personal behavior established by the state. And you will be monitored for compliance.

Another underlying issue speaks to the national character itself: Should we exchange our birthright of liberty for a promise of health care security that government cannot possibly keep?

Even assuming Republicans bent on repeal of Obamacare sweep November’s federal elections, the Democrats, who used every trick in the book to pass the law, will use every trick in the book to keep it in place.

There are no guarantees.

Obamacare is a time bomb. We have four months to elect people who are fully committed to defusing it.

What Roberts has handed the American people is no less than the mastery of their own fate, and that is a golden opportunity. If we blow it — if we fail to enact a change in the White House and in the control of the Senate — we will condemn future generations to an America sickly in body and spirit.

Related topics: -obamacare, congress, john-roberts, kevin-o’brien, patient-protection-and-affordable-care-act, u.s.-supreme-court

The American Emperor, Barack Hussein Obama the First

Strassel: Obama’s Imperial Presidency

When Congress won’t do what he wants,

he ignores it and acts anyway.

by Kimberley Strassel    at  the Wall Street Journal:

The ObamaCare litigation is history, with the president’s takeover of the health sector deemed constitutional. Now we can focus on the rest of the Obama imperial presidency.

Where, you are wondering, have you recently heard that term? Ah, yes. The “imperial presidency” of George W. Bush was a favorite judgment of the left about our 43rd president’s conduct in war, wiretapping and detentions. Yet say this about Mr. Bush: His aggressive reading of executive authority was limited to the area where presidents are at their core power—the commander-in-chief function.

By contrast, presidents are at their weakest in the realm of domestic policy—subject to checks and balances, co-equal to the other branches. Yet this is where Mr. Obama has granted himself unprecedented power. The health law and the 2009 stimulus package were unique examples of Mr. Obama working with Congress. The more “persistent pattern,” Matthew Spalding recently wrote on the Heritage Foundation blog, is “disregard for the powers of the legislative branch in favor of administrative decision making without—and often in spite of—congressional action.”

Put another way: Mr. Obama proposes, Congress refuses, he does it anyway.

For example, Congress refused to pass Mr. Obama’s Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for some not here legally. So Mr. Obama passed it himself with an executive order that directs officers to no longer deport certain illegal immigrants. This may be good or humane policy, yet there is no reading of “prosecutorial discretion” that allows for blanket immunity for entire classes of offenders.

Mr. Obama disagrees with federal law, which criminalizes the use of medical marijuana. Congress has not repealed the law. No matter. The president instructs his Justice Department not to prosecute transgressors. He disapproves of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, yet rather than get Congress to repeal it, he stops defending it in court. He dislikes provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, so he asked Congress for fixes. That effort failed, so now his Education Department issues waivers that are patently inconsistent with the statute.

Similarly, when Mr. Obama wants a new program and Congress won’t give it to him, he creates it regardless. Congress, including Democrats, wouldn’t pass his cap-and-trade legislation. His Environmental Protection Agency is now instituting it via a broad reading of the Clean Air Act. Congress, again including members of his own party, wouldn’t pass his “card-check” legislation eliminating secret ballots in union elections. So he stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with appointees who pushed through a “quickie” election law to accomplish much the same. Congress wouldn’t pass “net neutrality” Internet regulations, so Mr. Obama’s Federal Communications Commission did it unilaterally.

In January, when the Senate refused to confirm Mr. Obama’s new picks for the NLRB, he proclaimed the Senate to be in “recess” and appointed the members anyway, making a mockery of that chamber’s advice-and-consent role. In June, he expanded the definition of “executive privilege” to deny House Republicans documents for their probe into the botched Fast and Furious drug-war operation, making a mockery of Congress’s oversight responsibilities.

This president’s imperial pretensions extend into the brute force the executive branch has exercised over the private sector. The auto bailouts turned contract law on its head, as the White House subordinated bondholders’ rights to those of its union allies. After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Justice Department leaked that it had opened a criminal probe at exactly the time the Obama White House was demanding BP suspend its dividend and cough up billions for an extralegal claims fund. BP paid. Who wouldn’t?

And it has been much the same in his dealings with the states. Don’t like Arizona’s plans to check immigration status? Sue. Don’t like state efforts to clean up their voter rolls? Invoke the Voting Rights Act. Don’t like state authority over fracking? Elbow in with new and imagined federal authority, via federal water or land laws.

In so many situations, Mr. Obama’s stated rationale for action has been the same: We tried working with Congress but it didn’t pan out—so we did what we had to do. This is not only admission that the president has subverted the legislative branch, but a revealing insight into Mr. Obama’s view of his own importance and authority.

There is a rich vein to mine here for GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Americans have a sober respect for a balance of power, so much so that they elected a Republican House in 2010 to stop the Obama agenda. The president’s response? Go around Congress and disregard the constitutional rule of law. What makes this executive overreach doubly unsavory is that it’s often pure political payoff to special interests or voter groups.

Mr. Obama came to office promising to deliver a new kind of politics. He did—his own, unilateral governance.

Write to kim@wsj.com