Rebulican Convention

I watched the Republican Convention and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It gave me hope for the future.  There were many great speakers giving uplifting talks about how we as Americans have worked hard to get to where we are at.  Most had a story about their ancestors who came to America and without the government's help worked hard to make the American Dream possible in their lives.  All of them had something to say about Romney and Obama.  Here are a few of my favorite quotes.

Mia Love, a Black Mormon, mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah.  "The polices of President Obama have failed us. We’re not better off than we were four years ago. And no rhetoric, bumper sticker or Hollywood campaign ad can change that.”

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez   - "I was a Democrat for many years, so were my parents.    Before I ran for district attorney, two Republicans invited my husband and me to lunch, and I knew a party switch was exactly what they wanted.  So, I told Chuck, ``We'll be polite, enjoy a free lunch, and then say good-bye.''  But we talked about issues -- they never used the words Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal.  We talked about many issues, like welfare, is it the way of life or hand up? Talked about size of government, how much should it tax families and small businesses?  And when we left that lunch, we got in the car and I looked over at Chuck and said,  ``I'll be damned. we're Republicans.''

Ann Romney did a great job of letting us know more about Mitt and her life.  Here are my favorite lines. "Then our first son came along. All at once I'm 22 years old, with a baby and a husband who's going to business school and law school at the same time, and I can tell you, probably like every other girl who finds herself in a new life far from family and friends, with a new baby and a new husband, that it dawned on me that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.  That was 42 years ago. Now we have five sons and 18 grandchildren and I'm still in love with that boy I met at a high school dance."  
 "I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a 'storybook marriage.' Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or Breast Cancer.  A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage."
"This man will not fail.  This man will not let us down. This man will lift up America!...You can trust Mitt. He loves America."


Mike Huckabee gave a great speech - "I want to clear the air about something that has been said. People wonder whether guys like me, an evangelical, would only support a fellow evangelical?  Well my friends I want to tell you something, of the four people on the two tickets, the only self-professed evangelical is Barack Obama.  And he supports changing the definition of marriage.  Believes that human life is disposable and expendable at any time in the wound, even beyond the womb.  And he tells people of faith that they have to bow their knees to the God of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls, health care. ...Let me say it as clearly as possible, that the attack on my Catholic brothers and sisters is an attack on me....Let me say to you tonight, I care far less as to where Mitt Romney takes his family to church, than I do about where he takes this country."
"Joe Biden's budget shows that while he wants to be very generous with your money through higher taxes and government spending, for years hegave less than two-tenths of one percent of his own money to charity.  He just wants you to give the government more so he and the Democrats can feel better about themselves. Mitt Romney has given over 16 percent of his income to church and charity."
"Look, I realize this is a man[Obama] who got a Nobel Peace Prize for what he would potentially do.  But in the real world, you get the prize for producing something, not just promising something."

 Paul Ryan was so energetic.  I really enjoyed his speech.  Here was a great line  - "College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life." 


Artur Davis, a black man, voted for Obama in 2008 and even spoke at Obama's Convention four years ago.  Here are some of his quotes, "Some of you may know, the last time I spoke at a convention, it turned out I was in the wrong place. So, Tampa, my fellow Republicans, thank you for welcoming me where I belong"   "Maybe we should have known that night in Denver that things that begin with plywood Greek columns and artificial smoke typically don't end well.  Maybe the Hollywood stars and the glamour blinded us a little: you thought it was the glare, some of us thought it was a halo."  "John F. Kennedy asked us what we could do for America. This Democratic Party asks what can government give you. Don't worry about paying the bill, it's on your kids and grandkids."

There was a surprise guest.  Clint Eastwood.  He did a very daring thing.  He spoke to an empty chair  representing Obama.  It was quite funny actually.  But he sums it all up with this quote - "When somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go."

On the night that Mitt Romney spoke there were quite a few people who spoke about the personal side of Mitt Romney, his time as a church leader in the LDS church.  It was very heart warming to hear how other people see him and not as a businessman.  

Mitt Romney said alot in his speech!!- He talked about his family, "Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist – because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died – she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose."
His wife Ann -  "I knew that her job as a mom was harder than mine.  I knew without question that her job as a mom was a lot more important than mine.  And as America saw Tuesday night, Ann would have succeed at anything she wanted to do."

He talked about our feelings - "How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America?  Many of you thought the way on election day four years ago.  Hope and change had a powerful appeal.  But tonight I would ask a simple question: if you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn't feel that way now, that he is President Obama?You know there is something wrong with the kind of job he has done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him."

The place went wild with this quote - "President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise…is to help you and your family."

I came away from the Convention very pumped up!! 

Obama and the teleprompter

Obama and the teleprompter have become one.
His critics will say this unfortunate photo reveals a deeper problem with his presidency -- that he's just a walking teleprompter.

For just one moment, through one camera lens, the President of the United States turned into a teleprompter.
He was at the suburban Ohio college to speak about the rising cost of college, but the medium seemed to get in the way of his message -- literally.

Newsweek said what??

This cover story was a shock to see.  Never thought to see that Newsweek would let anyone say negative things toward Pres Obama.  The writer says this:

I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.”

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.

Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

And all this despite a far bigger hike in the federal debt than we were promised. According to the 2010 budget, the debt in public hands was supposed to fall in relation to GDP from 67 percent in 2010 to less than 66 percent this year. If only. By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Among developed economies, only Ireland and Spain have seen a bigger deterioration.

Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009, but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue.

His much-vaunted health-care reform will not prevent spending on health programs growing from more than 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent in 2037. Add the projected increase in the costs of Social Security and you are looking at a total bill of 16 percent of GDP 25 years from now. That is only slightly less than the average cost of all federal programs and activities, apart from net interest payments, over the past 40 years. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.

And even that figure understates the real debt burden. The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues—what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true “fiscal gap”—is $222 trillion.

The president’s supporters will, of course, say that the poor performance of the economy can’t be blamed on him. They would rather finger his predecessor, or the economists he picked to advise him, or Wall Street, or Europe—anyone but the man in the White House.

There’s some truth in this. It was pretty hard to foresee what was going to happen to the economy in the years after 2008. Yet surely we can legitimately blame the president for the political mistakes of the past four years. After all, it’s the president’s job to run the executive branch effectively—to lead the nation. And here is where his failure has been greatest.

On paper it looked like an economics dream team: Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee, not to mention Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner, and Paul Volcker. The inside story, however, is that the president was wholly unable to manage the mighty brains—and egos—he had assembled to advise him.

According to Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men, Summers told Orszag over dinner in May 2009: “You know, Peter, we’re really home alone ... I mean it. We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes [of indecisiveness on key economic issues].” On issue after issue, according to Suskind, Summers overruled the president. “You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him make a decision,” Summers told Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.” (I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable “seminar” on Afghanistan policy.)

This problem extended beyond the White House. After the imperial presidency of the Bush era, there was something more like parliamentary government in the first two years of Obama’s administration. The president proposed; Congress disposed. It was Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts who wrote the stimulus bill and made sure it was stuffed full of political pork. And it was the Democrats in Congress—led by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank—who devised the 2,319-page Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank, for short), a near-perfect example of excessive complexity in regulation. The act requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies, and issue 22 periodic reports. It eliminates one regulator and creates two new ones.

It is five years since the financial crisis began, but the central problems—excessive financial concentration and excessive financial leverage—have not been addressed.

Today a mere 10 too-big-to-fail financial institutions are responsible for three quarters of total financial assets under management in the United States. Yet the country’s largest banks are at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements under the new “Basel III” accords governing bank capital adequacy.

And then there was health care. No one seriously doubts that the U.S. system needed to be reformed. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the “fee for service” model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers.

Ironically, the core Obamacare concept of the “individual mandate” (requiring all Americans to buy insurance or face a fine) was something the president himself had opposed when vying with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. A much more accurate term would be “Pelosicare,” since it was she who really forced the bill through Congress.

Pelosicare was not only a political disaster. Polls consistently showed that only a minority of the public liked the ACA, and it was the main reason why Republicans regained control of the House in 2010. It was also another fiscal snafu. The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

The president just kept ducking the fiscal issue. Having set up a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, headed by retired Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Obama effectively sidelined its recommendations of approximately $3 trillion in cuts and $1 trillion in added revenues over the coming decade. As a result there was no “grand bargain” with the House Republicans—which means that, barring some miracle, the country will hit a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1 as the Bush tax cuts expire and the first of $1.2 trillion of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are imposed. The CBO estimates the net effect could be a 4 percent reduction in output.

The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States.

Meanwhile, the fiscal train wreck has already initiated a process of steep cuts in the defense budget, at a time when it is very far from clear that the world has become a safer place—least of all in the Middle East.

For me the president’s greatest failure has been not to think through the implications of these challenges to American power. Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed—perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize—that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

In Tokyo in November 2009, the president gave his boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech: “In an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another ... The United States does not seek to contain China ... On the contrary, the rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations.” Yet by fall 2011, this approach had been jettisoned in favor of a “pivot” back to the Pacific, including risible deployments of troops to Australia and Singapore. From the vantage point of Beijing, neither approach had credibility.

His Cairo speech of June 4, 2009, was an especially clumsy bid to ingratiate himself on what proved to be the eve of a regional revolution. “I’m also proud to carry with me,” he told Egyptians, “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalamu alaikum ... I’ve come here ... to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based ... upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”

Believing it was his role to repudiate neoconservatism, Obama completely missed the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy—precisely the wave the neocons had hoped to trigger with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When revolution broke out—first in Iran, then in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail.

In the case of Iran he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. Ditto Syria. In Libya he was cajoled into intervening. In Egypt he tried to have it both ways, exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, then drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.” The result was a foreign-policy debacle. Not only were Egypt’s elites appalled by what seemed to them a betrayal, but the victors—the Muslim Brotherhood—had nothing to be grateful for. America’s closest Middle Eastern allies—Israel and the Saudis—looked on in amazement.

“This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times in February 2011. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”

Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security. Yet the public mistakes his administration’s astonishingly uninhibited use of political assassination for a coherent strategy. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the civilian proportion of drone casualties was 16 percent last year. Ask yourself how the liberal media would have behaved if George W. Bush had used drones this way. Yet somehow it is only ever Republican secretaries of state who are accused of committing “war crimes.”
 The real crime is that the assassination program destroys potentially crucial intelligence (as well as antagonizing locals) every time a drone strikes. It symbolizes the administration’s decision to abandon counterinsurgency in favor of a narrow counterterrorism. What that means in practice is the abandonment not only of Iraq but soon of Afghanistan too. Understandably, the men and women who have served there wonder what exactly their sacrifice was for, if any notion that we are nation building has been quietly dumped. Only when both countries sink back into civil war will we realize the real price of Obama’s foreign policy.

America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement. Small wonder 46 percent of Americans—and 63 percent of Chinese—believe that China already has replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower or eventually will.

It is a sign of just how completely Barack Obama has “lost his narrative” since getting elected that the best case he has yet made for reelection is that Mitt Romney should not be president. In his notorious “you didn’t build that” speech, Obama listed what he considers the greatest achievements of big government: the Internet, the GI Bill, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the Apollo moon landing, and even (bizarrely) the creation of the middle class. Sadly, he couldn’t mention anything comparable that his administration has achieved.

Now Obama is going head-to-head with his nemesis: a politician who believes more in content than in form, more in reform than in rhetoric. In the past days much has been written about Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s choice of running mate. I know, like, and admire Paul Ryan. For me, the point about him is simple. He is one of only a handful of politicians in Washington who is truly sincere about addressing this country’s fiscal crisis.

Over the past few years Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” has evolved, but the essential points are clear: replace Medicare with a voucher program for those now under 55 (not current or imminent recipients), turn Medicaid and food stamps into block grants for the states, and—crucially—simplify the tax code and lower tax rates to try to inject some supply-side life back into the U.S. private sector. Ryan is not preaching austerity. He is preaching growth. And though Reagan-era veterans like David Stockman may have their doubts, they underestimate Ryan’s mastery of this subject. There is literally no one in Washington who understands the challenges of fiscal reform better.

Just as importantly, Ryan has learned that politics is the art of the possible. There are parts of his plan that he is understandably soft-pedaling right now—notably the new source of federal revenue referred to in his 2010 “Roadmap for America’s Future” as a “business consumption tax.” Stockman needs to remind himself that the real “fairy-tale budget plans” have been the ones produced by the White House since 2009.

I first met Paul Ryan in April 2010. I had been invited to a dinner in Washington where the U.S. fiscal crisis was going to be the topic of discussion. So crucial did this subject seem to me that I expected the dinner to happen in one of the city’s biggest hotel ballrooms. It was actually held in the host’s home. Three congressmen showed up—a sign of how successful the president’s fiscal version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (about the debt) had been. Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since.

It remains to be seen if the American public is ready to embrace the radical overhaul of the nation’s finances that Ryan proposes. The public mood is deeply ambivalent. The president’s approval rating is down to 49 percent. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index is at minus 28 (down from minus 13 in May). But Obama is still narrowly ahead of Romney in the polls as far as the popular vote is concerned (50.8 to 48.2) and comfortably ahead in the Electoral College. The pollsters say that Paul Ryan’s nomination is not a game changer; indeed, he is a high-risk choice for Romney because so many people feel nervous about the reforms Ryan proposes.

But one thing is clear. Ryan psychs Obama out. This has been apparent ever since the White House went on the offensive against Ryan in the spring of last year. And the reason he psychs him out is that, unlike Obama, Ryan has a plan—as opposed to a narrative—for this country.

Mitt Romney is not the best candidate for the presidency I can imagine. But he was clearly the best of the Republican contenders for the nomination. He brings to the presidency precisely the kind of experience—both in the business world and in executive office—that Barack Obama manifestly lacked four years ago. (If only Obama had worked at Bain Capital for a few years, instead of as a community organizer in Chicago, he might understand exactly why the private sector is not “doing fine” right now.) And by picking Ryan as his running mate, Romney has given the first real sign that—unlike Obama—he is a courageous leader who will not duck the challenges America faces.

The voters now face a stark choice. They can let Barack Obama’s rambling, solipsistic narrative continue until they find themselves living in some American version of Europe, with low growth, high unemployment, even higher debt—and real geopolitical decline.

Or they can opt for real change: the kind of change that will end four years of economic underperformance, stop the terrifying accumulation of debt, and reestablish a secure fiscal foundation for American national security.

I’ve said it before: it’s a choice between les États Unis and the Republic of the Battle Hymn.

I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win.

Quotes of the Day

Thomas Edison - "There is far more danger in public then in private monopoly, for when government goes into business it can always shift its losses to the taxpayer, government never makes ends meet, and that is the first requisite of business."

Davy Crockett - "Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." 

Steny Hoyer (Democratic House Whip) -  "If you talk to economists, they will tell you there are two things that are the most stimulative that you can do, one is unemployment insurance, the other is food stamps."   (ARE YOU SERIOUS?)

"You didn't build that"

Obama told us " If you've got a business, you didn't build that.  Somebody else made that happen".  That has offended alot of small business people including me.  My husband started his business with some savings that we had in the bank and also a small loan.  That first year he had to take on a night job to keep us going.  He spent many hours at both jobs hoping that our dream of owning our own business would become a reality.  After several years of hard work it started paying off and we started enjoying the fruits of our labors.  We did not get any help from the government.  But this just shows that Obama is a Socialist.  He wants whatever hard work you have put into to be put into the government coffers and handed out to everyone else equally.  That is not the American way.  That is socialism.  Why should we work hard any more if all that we get out of it is sending our earnings to the government to spend wastefully.  Here is his whole speech.

"We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts.  We can make some more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently…We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more …

"There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

"The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

"So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for president — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together."

Thought for the day

A lesson in irony.

The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is actually proud of the fact it is distributing the greatest amount of free meals and food stamps ever.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us to "Please Do Not Feed the Animals." 
Their stated reason for the policy is because the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.
This ends today's lesson.

ObamaCare ruled as a tax

It was very depressing yesterday when the Supreme court ruled the ObamaCare was ruled as Constitutional as long as the Mandate was considered as a Tax.  I was pretty upset with Chief Justice Roberts for the one writing the decision.  Today I read this article and it made me feel better.  Taken from:  http://www.theblaze.com/stories/five-reasons-why-the-obamacare-decision-might-not-be-as-bad-as-you-think/

Five Reasons Why the Obamacare Decision Might Not Be As Bad As You Think


Ever since the shocking ruling by the Supreme Court today that labeled Obamacare’s highly controversial individual mandate a “tax” was handed down, conservatives have been reacting with a mixture of depression and cold fury, especially toward the man who made it possible, Chief Justice John Roberts. Branded a “coward” in some corners, and a traitor by many, Roberts has been relentlessly criticized for a decision which many see as eroding the last obstacle to an overpowered government, and which certainly has the potential to do just that if the political philosophy that has so dominated the current administration continues unabated.
However, sympathetic though we are to these admittedly weighty fears of increased state power, we think one fact may have been a bit obscured by this response – this is still a decision by John Roberts. And John Roberts is still a Bush appointee, with a judicial philosophy that makes hardcore judicial liberals cringe, albeit a little less now. As such, since the decision was released, a steady drumbeat of commentary has gone up from everyone from Reason Magazine to Charles Krauthammer to Erick Erickson to George Will to even Ken Cuccinelli, one of the people who lost in the case, claiming the decision might be a sleeper victory. With a list of people like that believing they’ve secretly won, we figure we owe it to them to at least try to sum up the case for the Obamacare case being a success. Here are the top five reasons we can see why the Obamacare case might come back to haunt the Left and make the Right cheer:

#5. It made taxation the panacea for constitutional questions
No, really, hear us out. The fact that Obamacare‘s mandate has been arguably rewritten as a simple tax provision actually means something very positive at the political level for those who don’t want excessive government overreach to get carte blanche. Prior to this case, regulation of industries or people was always justified under the framework of interstate commerce (we’ll revisit this later). Now, however, taxation has been given a power that most liberals could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. On the surface, this looks like a bad thing. Actually, it could be quite the opposite.
Obamacare is probably the first case to ever involve what is arguably a sleeper tax – that is, a tax that isn’t called a tax in the law itself, but may behave like one. It will also probably be the last, because from now on, every single case that remotely involves IRS penalties as a means of enforcement will be instantly slammed as a sleeper mandate-style tax by its opponents and subjected to the same level of scrutiny as your average tax increase while in Congress. This mandate was able to get by on the fig leaf of being a penalty. Future adventures with the idea won’t have that luxury.
This means that Roberts has just sent every future mandate to clear the desk of anti-tax giants like Grover Norquist before it can get become law. All we can say is good luck with that.
#4. The liberal judges inadvertently brought Federalism back
Arguably ever since progressivism first became a potent political force, the fact that the Federal government is constrained in relation to the states has chafed endlessly at progressive policymakers. Perhaps for this reason, they have worked to make the very concept of states’ rights anathema, both legally and politically. Conservative jurists, meanwhile, have pushed back, citing the traditional separation of powers.
This case implicated that question strongly, as one of the less glamorous questions considered was whether a mandatory Medicaid expansion that was attached to Obamacare was constitutional in the first place. According to the Roberts Court, it was, but there was a serious catch, explained by Peter Suderman of Reason Magazine.  He basically said States are allowed to opt out of the Medicaid expansion without any retaliation in terms of existing funding from the Federal Government. In effect, this meant that the expansion was completely toothless, and states would only undertake it if they thought that additional money offered by the Federal government was worth it. The idea that states can opt out of anything is a huge jump towards state sovereignty. But, you might be thinking, so what? Roberts could have gotten all that and more if he’d signed on with the conservatives. This misses the fact that not only did Roberts resurrect states’ rights, but he did it with the blessing of several liberal justices on the court, since the ruling on the Medicaid expansion came down 7-2. This is the equivalent of getting Al Sharpton to vote against affirmative action, and it means that functionally, even the Court’s Left has declared the Constitution itself in favor of state sovereignty over and against Federal overreach. To quote Ken Cuccinelli:

“They preserved our first principles protections, our individual liberty protections. They advanced state sovereignty, strangely enough, while keeping the law. That was not one of the combinations that were even in our top five. That permutation was one that we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking was a likely outcome. But here we are. That’s the one we’ve got.”

#3. Roberts actually set up a limit on the Commerce Clause
This is similar to the situation above, except even bigger. One of the signature judicial “achievements” of the Left has been the erosion of individual liberty using Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. This disturbing trend arguably reached its peak in Wickard v. Filburn, a case that said that Congress could regulate everything including how much wheat a farmer fed his hogs because that could have a plausible impact on interstate commerce. In the face of this, liberals rushed to pass every conceivable form of regulation, no matter how nitpicky or micromanaging it was, because if that was allowed, everything was. Successive courts nibbled around the edges in cases like United States vs. Morrison, but ultimately left this expansive reading untouched.
Until now. You see, there was one thing Wickard never did. It never said you could make a farmer buy wheat. Oh, you could regulate how he used it once he bought it, or how he produced it in order to sell it, but you couldn’t say he had to go buy it if he had no intention of doing so in the first place. And as it turns out, you can’t. The Court drew a line in the sand, saying the Federal government can’t create commerce in order to regulate it. This could easily have gone the other way if a liberal had written the opinion. As George Will pointed out:

If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power — the power to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior for whatever Congress deems a public benefit. Instead, the court rejected the Obama administration’s Commerce Clause doctrine. The court remains clearly committed to this previous holding: “Under our written Constitution . . . the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.”

Fortunately, that’s not what happened. Instead, with the support of his conservative colleagues, Roberts wrote this reading of the commerce clause into law:

“The power to regulate commerce presupposes the existence of commercial activity to be regulated. . . . The individual mandate, however, does not regulate existing commercial activity. It instead compels individuals to become active in commerce by purchasing a product, on the ground that their failure to do so affects interstate commerce. Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. . . . Allowing Congress to justify federal regulation by pointing to the effect of inaction on commerce would bring countless decisions an individual couldpotentially make within the scope of federal regulation, and — under the government’s theory — empower Congress to make those decisions for him.”

This is the brightest line in the sand ever drawn on the question of where the interstate commerce power ends. The excuse of the taxing power is, as we’ve pointed out above, a trap for the Left. This standard, meanwhile is very likely to get more rigorous as time goes on. As Cuccinelli says:

“They’ve turned this whole thing into a spending and regulation question with this ruling. The individual liberty pieces were preserved and states got strengthened here in the constitutional structure under this ruling.”

In order to undo the evils of previous decisions like Wickard, the Court first had to take a stand and say, “This much and no further” when it came to interstate commerce. Thanks to Roberts, it has.
#2. This deflates Occupy Wall Street’s biggest cause
Look, we‘re not pretending this case isn’t a victory for the Obama administration. It is. However, it also gives conservatives an unexpected right hook to use against the Obama administration’s Democratic base. Remember how before this decision came out, every liberal within breathing distance was bemoaning the fact that the case Citizens United v. FEC, which they claimed was decided by a runaway “activist court,” had permanently ceded American government to those with money?
You should, because many left-wing protests, including Occupy Wall Street and the Wisconsin protesters, used Citizens United as a rallying cry. Like the Obamacare decision, Citizens United is a 5-4 decision, and had Obamacare come down differently, Occupy Wall Street and their brethren could have used that as yet more evidence that it’s time for a constitutional amendment to “save Democracy.”
Except Obamacare’s decision came down technically in their favor. And that means that all the liberals who were sharpening their knives to go after this “activist court” suddenly have to revise their low opinion and start treating the Court’s decisions as final. Now, of course, it could be said that the same applies to conservatives who like the Citizens United ruling, who now have to endorse the Obamacare ruling. However, there’s a big difference – the Obamacare ruling doesn‘t say it’s unconstitutional to repeal Obamacare. It just says Obamacare is constitutional. Citizens United, meanwhile, says you absolutely cannot enact certain kinds of campaign finance law, no matter how much the bedraggled masses at Zuccotti Park might want you to. In other words, one simply leaves decisions up to Americans. The other hardwires an obstacle to progressive attacks on speech into the Constitution. And thanks to John Roberts’ decision, Leftists now have to either argue against Obamacare or for Citizens United. Arguably the main talking point that motivates their base – too much evil Republican money in politics – has just been frozen out of relevance. Charles Krauthammer puts it best:

Whatever one thinks of the substance of Bush v. Gore, it did affect the reputation of the court. Roberts seems determined that there be no recurrence with Obamacare. Hence his straining in his Obamacare ruling to avoid a similar result — a 5 to 4 decision split along ideological lines that might be perceived as partisan and political.[...]
How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.
Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the commerce clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the commerce clause fig leaf.
Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.

1.  Mitt Romney now will have a much easier time defeating Barack Obama
When it comes to this one, as President Obama might say, “this is not politics, this is math.” In the not-quite-24-hours since Obamacare was ruled constitutional, Mitt Romney has raised a breathtaking $3 million, according to Politico. Why? We’ll let Erick Erickson make the case for us:

Finally, while I am not down on John Roberts like many of you are today, i will be very down on Congressional Republicans if they do not now try to shut down the individual mandate. Force the Democrats on the record about the mandate. Defund Obamacare. This now, by necessity, is a political fight and the GOP sure as hell should fight.
60% of Americans agree with them on the issue. And guess what? The Democrats have been saying for a while that individual pieces of Obamacare are quite popular. With John Roberts’ opinion, the repeal fight takes place on GOP turf, not Democrat turf. The all or nothing repeal has always been better ground for the GOP and now John Roberts has forced everyone onto that ground. Oh, and as I mentioned earlier, because John Roberts concluded it was a tax, the Democrats cannot filibuster its repeal because of the same reconciliation procedure the Democrats used to pass it.
It seems very, very clear to me in reviewing John Roberts’ decision that he is playing a much longer game than us and can afford to with a life tenure. And he probably just handed Mitt Romney the White House.

How else to put it? Romney has been handed an issue where 60 percent of the voting public agree with him and told to run with it. The reaction of many people who previously were skeptical of Romney shows just how powerful this is – he has transformed from the problematic standard bearer of a party that might potentially have to face thorny questions on health care to the anti-Obamacare candidate: Anti-mandate, anti-massive tax on the middle class, and pro-liberty. Some have claimed his own law in Massachusetts will end up being used against him in this case. If that’s true, we’re at a loss for who could possibly use it. The Obama administration has to run on their record, and the fact of the matter is that running on a law that imposes a massive, unpopular tax on the whole country, is going to look a heck of a lot worse than running while disowning a previous experiment with the idea at the state level and promising to do away with the national version once elected. Romney’s moment of heresy was  years ago. Obama’s is right now.
Do these reasons presuppose a massive gamble on Roberts’ part? Absolutely. Could things go ruinously wrong if the makeup of the Court shifts to the Left after this decision? Yes. Could things go ruinously wrong if Mitt Romney doesn’t win in November? Obviously. But this decision could still turn out to be the nail in the coffin of the Obama Presidency. Or, perhaps more appropriately, this Court could be the death panel that decides it‘s time for Obama’s administration to end its life.