North Korean Thanksgiving Turkey

Forbes: Obama's Disdain For The Constitution Means We Risk Losing Our Republic

Dead-on and awesome. Things in the US really are this bad, and I'm glad some are finally waking up. 

By M. Northrop Buechner

Since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, he has changed it five times. Most notably, he suspended the employer mandate last summer. This is widely known, but almost no one seems to have grasped its significance.

The Constitution authorizes the President to propose and veto legislation. It does not authorize him to change existing laws. The changes Mr. Obama ordered in Obamacare, therefore, are unconstitutional. This means that he does not accept some of the limitations that the Constitution places on his actions. We cannot know at this point what limitations, if any, he does accept.

By changing the law based solely on his wish, Mr. Obama acted on the principle that the President can rewrite laws and—since this is a principle—not just this law, but any law. After the crash of Obamacare, many Congressmen have implored the President to change the individual mandate the same way he had changed the employer mandate, that is, to violate the Constitution again.

The main responsibility the Constitution assigns to the President is to faithfully execute the Laws. If the President rejects this job, if instead he decides he can change or ignore laws he does not like, then what?

The time will come when Congress passes a law and the President ignores it. Or he may choose to enforce some parts and ignore others (as Mr. Obama is doing now). Or he may not wait for Congress and issue a decree (something Mr. Obama has done and has threatened to do again).

Mr. Obama has not been shy about pointing out his path. He has repeatedly made clear that he intends to act on his own authority. “I have the power and I will use it in defense of the middle class,” he has said. “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress.” There are a number of names for the system Mr. Obama envisions, but representative government is not one of them.

If the President can ignore the laws passed by Congress, of what use is Congress? The President can do whatever he chooses. Congress can stand by and observe. Perhaps they might applaud or jeer. But in terms of political power, Congress will be irrelevant. Probably, it will become a kind of rubber-stamp or debating society. There are many such faux congresses in tyrannies throughout history and around the globe.

Mr. Obama has equal contempt for the Supreme Court. In an act of overbearing hubris, he excoriated Supreme Court Justices sitting helplessly before him during the 2010 State of the Union address—Justices who had not expected to be denounced and who were prevented by the occasion from defending themselves. Mr. Obama condemned them for restoring freedom of speech to corporations and unions.

Ignoring two centuries of practice, President Obama made four recess appointments in January 2012, when the Senate was not in recess. Three courts have found that his appointments were unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case. If the Supreme Court finds against him, what will Mr. Obama do?

We can get a hint by looking at how other parts of his Administration have dealt with Court decisions they did not like.

The Attorney General’s Office is the branch of government charged with enforcing federal laws. After the Supreme Court struck down the key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Attorney General Holder announced that he would use other provisions of the act to get around the Court’s decision.

The Supreme Court has defined the standard for sexual harassment as “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” behavior to a “reasonable person.” In open defiance of that ruling, the Obama Department of Education has declared a new definition of sexual harassment for colleges, that is, “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct,” even if it is not objectively offensive—thus reinforcing the reign of terror over sex on college campuses. If a young man’s request for a date turns out to be unwelcome, he is guilty of sexual harassment by definition.

The lack of respect for the Supreme Court by the Obama administration is manifest. They feel bound by the Court’s decisions only if they agree with them. If they disagree, it is deuces wild; they will embrace any fiction that nullifies the Court’s decision.

The direction in which Mr. Obama is taking us would make possible the following scenario. A Republican Congress is elected and repeals Obamacare over a Democratic President’s veto. The President refuses to enforce the repeal. The Supreme Court rules that the President’s refusal is unconstitutional. The President denounces that ruling and refuses to be bound by it.

If the President persists in rejecting all authority other than his own, the denouement would depend on the side taken by the Armed Forces. Whatever side that was, our national self-esteem would be unlikely to recover from the blow of finding that we are living in a banana republic.

The shocking fact is that our whole system of representative government depends on it being led by an individual who believes in it; who thinks it is valuable; who believes that a government dedicated to the protection of individual rights is a noble ideal. What if he does not?

Mr. Obama is moving our government away from its traditional system of checks and balances and toward the one-man-rule that dominates third world countries. He has said that he wants a fair country—implying that, as it stands, the United States is not a fair country—an unprecedented calumny committed against a country by its own leader.

What country does he think is more fair than the United States? He has three long years left in which to turn us into a fair country. Where does he intend to take us?

Mr. Obama got his conception of a fair country from his teachers. A fair country is an unfree country because it is regimented to prevent anyone from rising too high. Their ideal is egalitarianism, the notion that no one should be any better, higher, or richer than anyone else. Combined with a dollop of totalitarianism, egalitarianism has replaced communism as the dominant ideal in our most prestigious universities. Mr. Obama and his colleagues are the product of those universities, and they have their marching orders.

The most important point is that Mr. Obama does not consider himself bound by the Constitution. He could not have made that more clear. He has drawn a line in the concrete and we cannot ignore it.

Those who currently hold political office, and who want to keep our system of government, need to act now. Surely, rejection of the Constitution is grounds for impeachment and charges should be filed. In addition, there are many other actions that Congressmen can and should take—actions that will tell Mr. Obama that we have seen where he is going and we will not let our country go without a fight.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government had been created. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

We are losing it. If Mr. Obama’s reach for unprecedented power is not stopped, that will be the end. Everyone who values his life and liberty should find some way to say “No!” “Not now!” “Not yet!” “Not ever!”

M. Northrup Buechner is Associate Professor of Economics at St. John’s University, New York.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/11/19/obamas-disdain-for-the-constitution-means-we-risk-losing-our-republic/

Democrats Cream of the Crop!

Candor

Desperate Commie Sleeper

I'm Ready to Compromise Now that I've Lost!

Progressive Myth

The Obama Legacy

What Difference Does It Make?

The First Hustler Runs the Big Con (by Pat Buchannan)

On the Obamacare con:

The price Obama will be a long time paying for this victory is historic and huge.

First, there is the irreversible damage to his credibility and integrity. He conned the people into believing something he knew to be false — that all Americans would be allowed to keep the health care plans that they had and liked.

This assurance, repeated again and again, helped disarm the opposition. Americans who liked their doctors and insurance plans and were repeatedly told they could keep both were not only relieved; they became more receptive to the idea of helping the less fortunate.

Obama’s assurances of keeping your insurance plan if you like it now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips! No new taxes,” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss. Lewinsky,” and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.

As for the idealistic avatar of hope and change from 2008, who led the nation to believe that he was something new and different in politics, he has been revealed as the biggest cynic of them all.
Moreover, where his campaign against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and John McCain in 2008 seemed to hold out promise of a newly competent progressive crowd, those hopes have all but vanished in the legendary incompetence of the Obamacare rollout.

Here was the president’s signature program — what Social Security was to FDR, Medicare to LBJ — and one month into launch, it is grist for the mills of Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central.
Observing the rollout, one begins to appreciate what George Wallace meant when he talked of Washington being a city of “pointy-headed bureaucrats who can’t park a bicycle straight.” [....]
More here: http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2013/11/01/the-first-hustler-runs-the-big-con-n1734254/page/full

Patriots Wear It with Pride, While Tyrants Tremble