Obama's 'abuse of power' threatens to shut down Senate

by Audrey Hudson

Key Republican Senators are bracing for legislative battles and Constitutional challenges to President Barack Obama’s unprecedented end-run around Congress to install several controversial political appointees.

Obama announced the decision Wednesday to make the so-called recess appointments -- even though the Senate is not in recess -- putting Richard Cordray in charge of a contentious new consumer protection agency and also naming three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board​ (NLRB) – Sharon Block, Richard Griffin and Terence F. Flynn.

“Business as we know it in the Senate is over for this administration in terms of accomplishing anything legislatively or finding any cooperation from this side of the aisle,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R. –Wyo.). “He has poisoned the well.”

“Apparently, advise and consent called for in the Constitution doesn’t apply to this Chicago-style politician. He’s more interested in rewarding his friends than living under the law Americans need to abide by,” Barrasso said.

The Constitution allows the president to make recess appointments, but the controversy in this case is whether or not the Senate is in recess.

“I believe it’s an abuse of power. Now he is saying he’s above the law -- the law doesn’t apply to him,” Barrasso said.

Republicans have kept the Congress in a pro forma session, gaveling in for a few minutes of official business every three days. It’s a tactic that was used by Democrats during the Bush administration to block recess appointments. Additionally, Obama’s own Justice Department argued before the Supreme Court in 2010 that Congress is not in recess unless it’s absent for more than three days.

Republicans say they are frustrated because Obama did not nominate the NLRB picks until last month -- just two days before the Christmas holiday -- allowing no time for the Senate to hold hearings.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have stalled the confirmation of the lone Republican nominee for the labor board, Brian Hayes, since July 2009.

Another contentious factor in Obama’s maneuver, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created by the Dodd-Frank Act, requires that the new director be confirmed by the Senate, so Cordray’s appointment puts the agency’s legal authority in limbo.

“I don’t think he has the full authority to run this agency,” said J.W. Verrett, an assistant professor of law at George Mason University and a senior scholar at the Mercatus Center.

“The president’s decision is a purely political one, and not about consumer protection,” Verrett said. “In fact, he’s sacrificed consumer protection. He’s more interested in being tough on Congress than being tough on predatory lenders.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R. –Utah), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said these actions were not ordinary recess appointments but “egregious and inexcusable” acts of a president who thinks he’s above the law.

“As a matter of raw political force, can he do it? He just did,” Lee said.

“I think the president wanted to pick a really big fight, and he has surely chosen one,” Lee said. “This is a direct affront to the American people and the constitutional system of government that we have.”

Republicans are hesitant to give away their game plan on how they will respond to Obama’s move, but Lee suggested that Congress could withhold the salaries for the new federal appointees.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R. Ky.) said Obama “upped the ante” and set “a terrible precedent that could allow any future president to completely cut the Senate out of the confirmation process, appointing his nominees immediately after sending their names up to Congress.”

“This was surely not what the framers had in mind when they required the president to seek the advice and consent of the Senate in making appointments,” McConnell said.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R. –Utah) said Obama made the appointments to placate his “big labor allies,” but that it might not be enough to save him come Election Day.

“The president put his own political future and the radical views of his far-left base ahead of constitutional government. The president will have to answer to the American people for this power grab," Hatch said.

Vincent Vernuccio, a labor policy lawyer with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the NLRB appointees are a gift to Obama’s labor backers, and that Griffin comes to the board directly from a labor union.

“The vacancies on the Board have occurred because Obama has insisted on nominating pro-union ideologues too controversial to pass Senate confirmation,” Vernuccio said.

Richard Trumka​, president of the AFL-CIO, congratulated Obama on overcoming what he called “Republican obstructionists.”

“Working families and consumers should not pay the price for political ploys that have repeatedly undercut the enforcement of rules against Wall Street abuses and the rights of working people,” Trumka said.

Audrey Hudson, an award-winning investigative journalist, is a Congressional Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS. A native of Kentucky, Mrs. Hudson has worked inside the Beltway for nearly two decades -- on Capitol Hill as a Senate and House spokeswoman, and most recently at The Washington Times covering Congress, Homeland Security, and the Supreme Court. Follow Audrey on Twitter and Facebook.

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How to Lose to Obama

It's easy if you try.

by John Hayward

Some observers think that President Obama’s awful record should make it easy for any of the GOP candidates to beat him. That’s a dangerous delusion. No incumbent should ever be underestimated, especially one the media loves. Also, each of the Republican candidates has proven highly adept at techniques for losing the 2012 election. Here are a few of their favorites.

1. Engaging in academic discussions on the campaign trail: Newt Gingrich​ and Ron Paul​ are especially prone to doing this. Phrases like “hypothetically speaking” should be absolutely shunned by a presidential candidate. The voters are not eager to participate in a dorm-room bull session about the theoretical limits of American government, nor do they wish to be used in a laboratory experiment. Likewise, they’ll respect a command of history, but be turned off by long lectures about prior centuries. Dwelling at length upon the past is a good way to seem out of touch.

2. Forgetting about your own platform: The big thing Herman Cain​ did really well was talking up his own platform (although sometimes he was much better at delivering enthusiasm than details.) He brought everything back to the 999 Plan, and conveyed the sense he passionately believed in it. In fact, he’s still working on promoting it, even after suspending his campaign.

On the other hand, Rick Perry​ and even idea factory Newt Gingrich often neglect to bring up their own core proposals, some of which are quite dramatic. Both of them favor a flat tax, for example. That’s a huge change to our system. The 999 Plan is essentially a flat tax fused to a consumption tax, and Cain always knew it would rattle a lot of cages. Perry and Gingrich act like their flat tax plans are minor curiosities that can be looked up on their Web sites, should voters feel suitably motivated.

Worse, Perry has actually forgotten about important details of his own plan. Appearing in Iowa with Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal on Tuesday, he forgot that his plan included a standard deduction. Jindal had to remind him about it. Coupled with the infamous moment in which Perry couldn’t remember the third department he wanted to eliminate during a debate, it’s an unsettling tendency.

Treating a major policy change with this kind of neglect turns voters off. It makes them think the candidate hasn’t thought his plan all the way through, isn’t serious about implementing it, or hasn’t considered all of its ramifications. The candidate ends up taking the heat for proposing a bold idea, without reaping any of the rewards.

3. Picking fights with the Republican base. Some pundits wonder why Jon Huntsman has never managed more than an asterisk in the polls. Simple: he launched his campaign by aggressively insulting the conservative base, and declaring himself the moderate alternative to those Tea Party extremists. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and Huntsman’s first impression was awful. His relatively conservative campaign has never been able to overcome this.

In a similar vein, one of the reasons Mitt Romney​ has such a persistent ceiling on his appeal is that he’s either alienated various elements of the conservative movement in the past, or he’s patronizing them now. Ron Paul’s casual assertions that those who disagree with his foreign policy views are bloodthirsty warmongers alienates both Republican and general election voters. He actually said of Michele Bachmann​, on national television, “She hates Muslims. Yeah, she wants to go get ‘em.”

There’s always a tendency for candidates to “tack to the middle” during the general election, at the expense of their base. Hopefully none of the Republican candidates are under any illusions about the willingness of significant portions of their base to endure outright insults and betrayals. No matter how much they want Obama out of office, some of them can be persuaded to stay home on Election Night, arms folded in disgust.

4. Opposing Obama’s policies without understanding why they’re wrong: This is one of Mitt Romney’s big problems, courtesy of RomneyCare. Republican voters have spent years worrying that he would be an unreliable or ineffective opponent of ObamaCare… and in all those years, he still hasn’t found a way to reassure them. This is not merely peevish behavior on their part. They know moderate and independent voters need to hear an argument against ObamaCare that is not just convincing, but devastating. After all, they will be frequently reminded that repealing it will be a huge political and bureaucratic struggle.

Newt Gingrich will also face challenges in this area, because as sharp as he has been in debates, a little bit of his political soul will always be glued to that couch, next to Nancy Pelosi​.

5. Getting carried away: Michele Bachmann’s consistent mistake has been going too far with initially valid criticisms, and leaving herself open to chiding that she “doesn’t have her facts straight,” as Newt Gingrich put it during the last Republican debate. Imagine what that will be like when it’s not a grumpy Gingrich, but a school of “fact-checking” media piranha, ready to pounce on her.

A running theme of the Obama 2012 campaign will be that criticism of the President is morally illegitimate – in other words, the Republican candidate hates him because he’s black, or because they’re servants of the Evil Rich, et cetera. Sloppy criticism will play right into that storyline.

6. Losing control of the narrative: The great danger of media bias is not so much outright obfuscation or propaganda, although we’ll probably have some of that, too. The real danger is narrative control. To put it simply, the media decides on a plot line for the election, and it guides their coverage. This plot line will not be friendly to the GOP nominee.

The candidate should not underestimate his or her power to change the narrative. In 2008, John McCain​ was particularly horrible at this. He couldn’t put together a winning storyline of “How President McCain Won the White House.” He couldn’t even cobble together a good reason for voters to vote against his opponent, apparently terrified that strong criticism of Obama would blow up in his face.

Excessive timidity against Obama will result in a loss of narrative control, as media-influenced moderate voters begin wondering why the mousy GOP candidate wasted everyone’s time and money with an election. At some point, criticism of policy inevitably becomes "personal" criticism of the incumbent - who must, by definition, have been either malicious or foolish to insist on such disastrous policy for years.

A big part of narrative control is understanding how to engage the media, draw them along a desired path, and give them something positive they can’t help talking about. Rick Santorum​ and Jon Huntsman seem to have a lot of trouble grabbing the spotlight and doing this. It’s hard to suddenly become exciting.

7. Freezing up: By this I don’t just mean brain freezes on the debate stage, although those are plenty bad enough. Unexpected events will occur during the campaign. Some of these candidates have long histories, elements of which will be popping up at carefully timed moments. The campaigns must be ready to adapt. Herman Cain’s campaign gave us a couple of sharp lessons in how not to do it. Confusion and disarray among campaign operatives can be disastrous. Responses must be swift and coordinated.

As for the debate stage itself, there’s no doubt that mumbling and verbal lockups are bad news. Obama is a fairly smooth speaker, particularly in formal settings. He can say some remarkably weird things, but the way he says them conveys poise. He’s good at deploying stock phrases like “As I have always said” and “Let me be clear” when he needs to buy a little time. Both style and substance will be part of this campaign, and the Republican’s style will inevitably be judged more harshly.

President Obama is very beatable, but losing is easy too. Far too many post-mortems for failed campaigns begin with the observation that the candidate never really understood the forces aligned against him. The result of the 2012 campaign needs to be something better than a best-selling 2013 book by a defeated candidate, reviewing all the ways he or she was treated unfairly. Write that book in your heads right now, GOP contenders… and then run a campaign that tears it to shreds.

John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.

Union Leaders Blast Obama For Keystone XL Pipeline Delay

The President's rigid ideology is not worth thousands of jobs.

by John Hayward

Last night, Larry Kudlow of CNBC interviewed union leaders Brent Booker of the Construction Department Laborers’ International Union of North America and David Barnett from the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters. The topic was the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would create an enormous number of jobs for these two unions.

Booker wasn’t quite ready to agree with Kudlow’s assertion that President Obama was “turning his back” on the labor constituency, but he did profess himself to be “disappointed” that the President was “delaying his decision on the pipeline.”

“We’ve been supportive of this project for several years now,” noted Booker. “Our members, construction workers, and middle-class Americans are in desperate need of jobs, and we think that this project could create those for us.”

“We do need this pipeline,” Barnett agreed, clearly conscious that a whole lot of pipe fitting would be involved, while unemployment is currently running at 20-25% in that sector – among the most dire straits he can remember. “We’ve worked very hard in the last three years to get this permit for this pipeline.” He noted the extremely high environmental standards the project will meet, and how much America needs both the jobs and oil.

“You know, the American people are the ones who are going to jump-start this economy, and that’s the argument that I don’t think people are understanding,” Barnett astutely noted. Oh, rest assured, the President understands all that. He just doesn’t care. Remember, he was outspokenly willing to torpedo his own sacred “payroll tax cut” – which he claims is integral to job creation, and is in fact one of the only three ideas he has ever advanced for enhanced job creation – just to stop this pipeline project.

Obama’s other two job-creating ideas are extended unemployment benefits and infrastructure spending. “Infrastructure” is an ancient Greek word meaning “huge construction project.” Trans-continental pipelines, for example.

The President’s ideologically and politically motivated indecision could do a lot more than simply “delay” the pipeline, which Canada could route in other directions, if America doesn’t want it. Booker correctly fears such an outcome. “We already know [the Canadians] have got plans to ship the pipeline, ship the oil west, more than likely to Asian markets,” he said. “Asian markets” is an ancient Greek phrase meaning “China.”

“Quite frankly, the American people are tired of Washington D.C. politics going on, and their jobs are waiting in line for these decisions,” said Barnett at the conclusion of this remarkably candid interview. He declared himself a big believer in “green energy,” but is nevertheless realistic in his understanding that “we need oil today to drive this nation.” Perhaps the looming demise of the Keystone XL project will convince him that he, and the members of his union - along with the rest of job-starved America - are indeed looking at Barack Obama’s back.

John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.

Work for Obama, Get a Federal Contract

by Erick Erickson

Solyndra, Lightsquared, and now Solayzme are all companies that are closely connected to the Obama campaign and all got government money. While the Obama Administration has been attacking Republicans as "crony capitalists" and using an army of left-wing pseudo-journalists to make the attacks, the Obama Administration has been rewarding campaign friends with government contracts. In Barack Obama​'s America, he, not the marketplace, picks the winners and losers. But just how far into the government and into the Obama campaign does this crony capitalism go? In an email sent out by Jo Ellen Kaiser to a group of online left-wing sites, she notes that

In response to member inquires about solid advertising opportunities, The Media Consortium would like to present the opportunity to partner with IB5k Network. IB5k Network is actively seeking progressive publishing partners who accept online advertising for politically progressive candidates. We hope and expect this to be a lucrative and relevant ad stream through 2012. IB5k’s first opportunity for Media Consortium members is a great one with Obama for America. Available immediately, these static (no video or audio) digital ads ask viewers to sign up via email for Obama campaign updates. This is a short ad campaign starting immediately through the 5th of January. The advertisement is available in in 300x250, 728 x 90 and 160 x 600 sizes. A preview of the creative is available here: http://a.ib5knetwork.com/lt/obama_test.html. We know this is a busy time of year for everyone, but we believe this is a great opportunity with which to begin a relationship with IB5k. The Obama team set the gold standard for online political campaigns in 2008, and is certain to be placing many more ads through 2012. By beginning to work with IB5k now, you will be pre-approved to run those ads!

Jo Ellen Kaiser is the Executive Director of the Media Consortium and the email she sent came from her Media Consortium email address to a google group. The Media Consortium "is proud to partner with the We the People Campaign for Campaign Cash, a collaborative editorial effort to expose the influence of corporate money on the political process." IB5K, LLC, the company Jo Ellen Kaiser is pushing on her email list as the Obama advertiser, is a government contractor. So the group dedicated to exposing "the influence of corporate money on the political process" is helping out a company that's a government contractor and not just any government contract, but one that got its start on Obama 2008, then got a government contract, and is now handling online advertising for Obama 2012. But hey! If you work with IB5K now, "you will be pre-approved to run" ads for Obama 2012.

Back in November of 2010, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Joe Walker on entrepreneurial former Obama workers. There was this interesting nugget about one of Obama's campaign workers, Joe Beckman.

Mr. Beckmann, 30, says he learned how to collaborate with a network of volunteers and supporters while working on Mr. Obama's video team. His company similarly relies on 300 freelancers— filmmakers, graphic designers and programmers—sprinkled across the country. "It's hard when you have this many people in different time zones, to keep them all feeling connected," says Mr. Beckmann, who uses emails, personal visits and company retreats to keep his team focused on common goals. "The model for this really came from the Obama campaign." So far, it appears to be working for Mr. Beckmann. He says he's won a government contract to provide email-related services to Hill staffers, and he's helping Mystery Guitar Man—the YouTube sensation known for quirky YouTube videos—build a monetizable website. He expects IB5k to be profitable off of $1.2 million in revenue this year.

Campaign for Obama, get a federal contract. Is it really that easy? According to Beckmann's company website, which highlights work for Barack Obama and whose clients include the DNC, the DGA, and a host of liberal groups,

At the end of the day, our method saves you money. While members of our trust have been responsible for everything from creating initiatives at Obama for America, building 21st century cable networks from scratch, successfully bridging the gap between television and online video audiences, to developing custom-built software for Congress

I guess it really could be as easy as going to the Federal Procurement Data System, plugging in the names of all the Obama campaigners or their related businesses, and finding out who got a government contract after working for Barack Obama. Except, for some reason, Joe Beckmann's company IB5K, which the Wall Street Journal reports has a government contract and whose website reports it is developing software for Congress, does not appear in the Federal Procurement Data System. That brings us back to the Media Consortium, a group of left-wing pseudo-reporting sites that are going to be subsidized by the Obama campaign's campaign cash via a vendor who, were we talking about wingers, would be excoriating the crony capitalists getting government contracts after working for the winger campaign and not appearing in the federal procurement database. And yet here they are pitching an Obama advertising company that, after one of its principle partners worked on the Obama campaign got a government contract and now is again also handling Obama campaign advertising.

George Soros Funds Occupy Wall Street

by Matthew Vadum

Radical anti-American billionaire George Soros​ is a major backer of a left-wing group that is funneling money to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The nonprofit organization at the receiving end of Soros’ largesse, Alliance for Global Justice, is managing donations benefiting the communists, socialists, anarchists and hippies now occupying Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. As of Oct. 19, OWS had taken in a grand total of $435,000 from all sources, including donations made by individuals online and in person, according to reports.

It should surprise no one that Soros (net worth: $22 billion), the ultimate Wall Street insider and preeminent funder of the activist Left today, embraces Occupy Wall Street.

As I note in my new book Subversion Inc., this Communist sympathizer co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that wants to radically transform America. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline. Soros, a currency manipulator with an insider-trading conviction, praises Red China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.”

The Alliance for Global Justice has received grants from George Soros’ philanthropy, the Open Society Institute ($100,000 since 2004), and from the left-wing, money launderers of the Tides Foundation ($60,000 since 2004) that allows high-profile donors to give secretly to radical causes.

Much of the money received by the Tides network of philanthropies has come from Soros’ charity, according to philanthropy databases.

The Open Society Institute has given $24,599,553 to the Tides network of philanthropies since 1999. Of that total, $18,154,270 went to the Tides Foundation and the remaining $6,445,283 went to the Tides Center, which like the Alliance for Global Justice, serves as a fiscal sponsor for small or new activist groups.

A hotbed of anti-American activity, the Alliance takes money from the most extreme left-wing philanthropies operating in America today. The Alliance has accepted grants from the (pro-Fidel Castro​) Arca Foundation ($185,000 since 2001), General Service Foundation ($165,000 since 2001), and Foundation for DeepaEcology ($30,000 since 2000), an anti-science environmentalist group that regards human beings as a cancer on the earth.

Alliance for Global Justice is a “fiscal sponsor,” which means that it serves as a financial clearinghouse for radical causes that haven’t filed papers to incorporate themselves as nonprofit organizations. Donors give money to the Alliance and are then able to deduct the donations from their income tax even though the cause they are funding isn’t recognized as tax-exempt by the IRS. Fiscal sponsors take a percentage of donations as management fees, and then pass on the rest to the cause favored by the donor.

Founded in 1998, the Alliance, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., has a long history of anti-American activism. The Alliance and its resident, Katherine Hoyt, are longtime supporters of the Sandinista (Communist) movement in Nicaragua and the Zapatistas, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement in Mexico.

When a credit card-processing glitch caused the Alliance’s website to reject $144,000 in donations for Occupy Wall Street, Hoyt claimed that an evil capitalist conspiracy was afoot. “I can’t help but believe that politics must be involved somewhere,” Hoyt said in a statement on the Alliance’s website.

It turns out the donations were rejected because of the Alliance’s own technological blundering, so Hoyt’s comment was scrubbed from the website. Alliance leader Chuck Kaufman blamed technology for the banking error.

“Our group normally processes a dozen donations a week, so all of a sudden Occupy Wall Street took off and it was 400 per day,” Kaufman said. “We just didn’t understand the banking architecture.”

Other causes supported by the Alliance include the antiwar group World Can’t Wait (a spinoff of the Revolutionary Communist Party), and Courage to Resist, which encourages U.S. soldiers to desert and supports accused traitor Bradley Manning of WikiLeaks infamy. Its leaders also have an abiding hatred of Israel. The Alliance has funded anti-Israel groups including Israeli Anarchists Against the War and Bil’in Center for Joint Struggle.

The Alliance for Global Justice’s antipathy toward things that Americans revere makes it a perfect business partner for George Soros.

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Matthew Vadum is Senior Editor at Capital Research Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off Taxpayers, (WND Books, 2011).

Wingless, Bloodsucking and Parasitic - Meet the Flea Party

by Ann Coulter

10/12/2011

So far, the only major accomplishment of the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters is that it has finally put an end to their previous initiative, "Occupy Our Mothers' Basements."

Oddly enough for such a respectable-looking group -- a mixture of adolescents looking for a cause, public sector union members, drug dealers, criminals, teenage runaways, people who have been at every protest since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, people 95 percent of whose hair is concentrated in their ponytails, Andrea Dworkin​ look-alikes and other average Democrats -- they can't even explain what they're protesting.

The protesters either treat inquiries about their purpose as a trick question, or -- worse -- instantly rattle off a series of insane causes: "No. 1, abolish capitalism; No. 2, because 9/11 was an inside job; No. 3, because Mumia is innocent ..."

Curiously, the only point universally agreed upon by the protesters and their admirers in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media is that "Occupy Wall Street" should be compared to the tea party. Yes, that would be the same tea party that has been denounced and slandered by the Democratic Party and the mainstream media for the last three years.

As a refresher: The Democratic National Committee called the tea partiers "angry mobs" and "rabid right-wing extremists." ABC said they were a "mob." CNN accused them of "rabble rousing." Harry Reid called them "evil mongers." Nancy Pelosi​ said they were "un-American." CNN's Anderson Cooper​ and every single host on MSNBC called the tea partiers a name that referred to an obscure gay sex act.

But apparently liberals couldn't even convince themselves that tea partiers were an extremist group unworthy of emulation.

At least they're embarrassed about what the OWS protesters really are: wingless, bloodsucking and parasitic. This is the flea party, not the tea party.

Contrary to all the blather you always hear about how lawless street protests and civil disobedience are part of the American tradition -- "what our troops are fighting for!" -- they are not. We are an orderly people with democratic channels at our disposal to change our government.

The very reason we have a constitutional republic is because of a mob uprising. Soon after the American Revolution, Shays' Rebellion so terrified and angered Americans that they demanded a federal government capable of crushing such mobs.

For nearly 200 years, Americans understood that they lived in a country capable of producing bad politicians and bad policies, but that it was subject to change through peaceful, democratic means. There was no need to riot or storm buildings because we didn't have a king. We had a representative government.

Even when injustice existed, there were constitutional mechanisms to right wrongs.

For nearly a century after the Civil War, congressional Republicans kept introducing bills that implemented the civil rights amendments -- only to be blocked by segregationist Democrats. But then, attorney Thurgood Marshall​ came along and began winning cases before the Supreme Court, redeeming black Americans' constitutional rights through the judiciary.

As long as a Republican sat in the White House, those victories were enforced. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Ark., to walk black children to school in defiance of the segregationist, Democratic governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus -- Bill Clinton's friend.

This is what our Constitution was designed for: to use the force of the federal government to uphold the law when the states couldn't (Shays' Rebellion) or wouldn't (segregationist Democrats).

If Richard Nixon had won the 1960 election instead of John F. Kennedy -- as some say he did -- there never would have been a need for Rosa Parks, the Freedom Rides and the rest of the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement.

But as soon as the Democrats got control of the White House, enforcement of the Supreme Court's civil rights rulings came to a crashing halt. Elected Democrats in the states were free to violate legitimate constitutional rulings without interference from Democratic presidents.

The ingenious system given to us by our founding fathers faltered on the morally corrupt obstructionism of elected Democrats. They simply refused to abide by the rules -- with glee at the state level, and at the federal level, cowardice.

Here, finally, was an appropriate case for nonviolent protest. There hasn't been another justification for civil disobedience in this country until the Supreme Court invented a "right" to abortion in Roe v. Wade -- another act of lawlessness by liberals.

(All this and more is detailed in the smash best-seller, "Demonic: How the Liberal Mobs Are Endangering America"!)

Now liberals compare their every riot, every traffic blockage, every Starbucks-window-smashing street protest to the civil rights movement –- which was only necessary because of them. These "Occupy Wall Street" ignoramuses seem to imagine they are blacks living in 1963 Alabama under Democratic governor George Wallace​.

To the contrary, the Wall Street protesters have no specific objections and no serious policy proposals in a country that is governed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, "by the people." They protest because they enjoy creating mayhem, not because the law is being ignored or their rights violated without penalty by government officials.

They are not in the tradition of the tea partiers, much less our founding fathers. They are not in the tradition of the civil rights movement or Operation Rescue. They are in the tradition of Shays' Rebellion, the Weathermen and Charles Manson.

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Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Slander, Treason, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Godless, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and their Assault on America, and the forthcoming Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.

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ObamaCare Reaches the Supreme Court

It’s all or nothing in the court battle that had to happen.

by John Hayward

On Wednesday, the National Federation of Independent Business petitioned the Supreme Court to review a decision from the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding ObamaCare. The Obama Justice Department feels good about its general track record defending the law in appeals courts, and has also filed a petition with the Supremes.

The Administration could have kept things bottled up in the 11th Circuit for a while, but most observers agree it would go all the way to the highest court sooner or later... and if "later" meant after the 2012 elections, there might have been a very different Justice Department arguing the government's case, with decidedly less enthusiasm.

A Supreme Court battle fought during the height of the election would make the unpopular law into dinner-table conversation at a moment when the President doesn't want voters choking on all the things his signature legislation forces them to do. Victory now would give Obama some campaign talking points, while defeat at this early date would leave him with time to recover.

From a legal standpoint, this is the main event: the heavyweight title fight between Obama’s health care scheme and the nation that never wanted it.

The 11^th Circuit made two important points in its ruling. First, ObamaCare’s individual mandate is unconstitutional. Second, the court “severed” the mandate from the rest of ObamaCare, leaving the rest of the beast to shamble mindlessly forward after surgically removing its pulsating heart.

The individual mandate is the core rationale of ObamaCare, which socializes health insurance costs by requiring everyone to purchase insurance. In essence, insurance companies would be given a guaranteed income stream, in exchange for providing lavish mandatory benefits, enumerated in the thousands of pages of regulations that would re-shape the American economy to accommodate the President’s agenda.

Remember, at one point ObamaCare was going to require small businesses to fill out millions of 1099 tax forms, in an effort to capture a little previously uncollected tax revenue, and defray some of the immense cost of the program. Thus was a “health care” bill intended to change the way American small businesses paid for paper clips.

The “mandate” concept, ruled unconstitutional by the 11th Circuit Court, was introduced for a simple political reason: it allowed the architects of ObamaCare to pretend it was not being funded by a “tax.” The bill was already a tough sell when the public was bamboozled by wild claims of deficit neutrality, and hypnotized by thousands of rapidly spinning clauses and sub-clauses. The public mind would have been sharply focused if they had been told they were about to be hit with a new multi-trillion-dollar “tax.” Mandates are taxes the IRS doesn’t collect.

Without the individual mandate, both the funding mechanisms and basic logic vanish from a bureaucratic nightmare that was already poised to blow our stratospheric national debt into whatever comes after the stratosphere. (I looked it up. It’s the mesosphere. After that you’ve got the thermosphere, which America’s debt should pass through sometime around 2020. Then it’s out of the blue, and into the black.)

It’s highly unlikely that ObamaCare could have passed Congress without the individual mandate in place. It barely crawled off Capitol Hill as it was, leaving a grisly trail of kickbacks, payoffs, and backroom deals glimmering in the moonlight behind it.

Nevertheless, there’s not a chance that the white-knuckled statists of the Democrat Party would allow the rest of their health care takeover die after losing its heart. The only way to put this thing down for good is to nullify the “severability” ruling, and that’s what the National Federation of Independent Business is shooting for. As Heartland Institute Research Fellow Ben Domenech put it:

It is absolutely essential that the Supreme Court take up the matter of severability along with giving us its ruling on the individual mandate within President Obama’s health law. The Court must decide this as a whole issue, as soon as possible, to end the uncertainty that has continued to cloud economic decisions by thousands of American small businesses and firms.

States, firms, and citizens need to know what to expect, and legislators will soon learn if there is any limit to the power granted to the Congress via the Commerce Clause, or whether Washington can command anyone to purchase any product for the entirety of their life.

This case has implications beyond even ObamaCare, which might at least face political repeal someday, if it survives its rendezvous with the Supreme Court. As Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett​, a staunch ObamaCare critic who represents the NFIB, told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday:

We’re claiming that they’re making people engage in economic activity, not regulating or prohibiting them from doing so. And that’s something, the government’s doing something here they’ve never done before. In fact, all the courts who have heard this case, Hugh, whether they’ve upheld the mandate, struck it down, or said we can’t decide because of jurisdictional issues, they’ve all agreed nothing like this has ever happened before. There is no Supreme Court precedent that allows Congress to do this. And now, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide if they want to allow Congress this additional new power they’ve never had before, the power to make every man, woman and child in the country buy, do business with a private company, and do so for the rest of their lives.

(Emphasis mine.) ObamaCare was so badly written and hastily cobbled together that even today, we’re still discovering billion-dollar glitches. The National Bureau of Economic Research just released a study that shows "official budget forecasts ignored the cost of insuring many employee’s spouses and children,” because the Congressional Budget Office​ was “expressly told to do their modeling on single coverage” when analyzing ObamaCare.

How big was this little goof? Oh, a mere $50 billion per year. It’s going to throw off the formula used to determine which families are eligible to join the budget-blasting “federal exchanges.” That just happens to be another core concept of ObamaCare. Some of the valves in this monster’s heart have already clogged up.

The case before the Supreme Court is our last line of legal defense against a fundamental reconstitution of the relationship between American citizens and their government. ObamaCare will make them forever wards of the State, who can be compelled to do whatever the State thinks is good for them… even when that involves making formerly voluntary transactions with private corporations into compulsory requirements of citizenship. May the Supreme Court put an end to this abomination now, and may the people who unleashed it upon us be held accountable at the ballot box.

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John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.