“The ‘Lawless’ Presidencies Of Barack Obama And Ronald Reagan”: Consistency Must Count For Something, Otherwise It’s Hypocrisy
The headline emerging from last week’s SOTU address continues to be the President’s stated intent to go around Congress, where necessary, to effectuate elements of his agenda through the use of the executive order.
So grave is the situation—according to conservative leaders and pundits—Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) took to the airwaves this weekend to warn one and all that we now have “an increasingly lawless presidency.”
Tea Party firebrand, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, could not agree more.
Indeed, so concerned is King with Obama’s decision to order up a raise for those employed by federal contractors, he referred to the executive action granting the wage increase as a “constitutional violation”, adding “we’ve never had a president with that level of audacity and that level of contempt for his own oath of office.”
Still, a highly placed White House aide noted that there are a number of things “the President can unilaterally do,” stating that “With a hostile Congress that doesn’t show much sign of coming toward us on some of these issues, it behooves us to take the initiative when we can take it.”
There is, however, one thing I should point out regarding the sequencing of events set forth above.
While Paul Ryan and Steve King are certainly functioning in today’s highly charged political environment, the White House aide who made the statements regarding the President’s ability to do many a thing unilaterally—particularly when a hostile Congress is not cooperating with the president’s agenda—was none other than Gary L. Bauer, chief domestic policy advisor to President Ronald W. Reagan. What’s more, the statements were made in August of 1987 and were the direct result of the years of frustration Reagan had experienced at the hands of a Congress that simply would not get with his program.
Sound familiar?
Of course, nothing President Reagan did through the use of his executive order power could possibly match the severity of Obama’s attempt to get around an obstructionist Congress in order to accomplish his own agenda, right?
Not so much.
Do the words ‘National Security Agency’ ring a bell?
The NSA, of course, is the government body that has been collecting our phone and Internet data while spying on Americans and foreigners (including foreign leaders) in ways that have infuriated the very Republicans—along with just about everyone else—who hold Ronald Wilson Reagan up to be the icon of modern day conservatism.
As a result, you might be surprised to learn the following bit of history:
It was President Reagan’s infamous Executive Order 12333 (referred to as “twelve-triple-three”) that established and handed to the NSA virtually all of the powers under which the agency operates to this day—allowing the agency to collect the data that so many now find to be so offensive.
McClatchy describes Executive Order 12333 as follows:
“It is a sweeping mandate that outlines the duties and foreign intelligence collection for the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies. It is not governed by Congress, and critics say it has little privacy protection and many loopholes.”
If you view Reagan’s actions as an appropriate use of the executive order, Tea Party/GOP Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI) would beg to differ.
Speaking at a gathering hosted by the Cato Institute, Amash described Congressional hearings into the actions of the NSA as follows:
“Amash describes those briefings as a farce. Many times, he says, they focused on information that was available from reading newspapers or public statutes. And his account of trying to get details out of those giving the briefings sounds like an exercise in frustration:”
“So you don’t know what questions to ask because you don’t know what the baseline is. You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on. So you have to start just spitting off random questions: Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear? Does the government have a cyborg army? If you don’t know what kind of things the government might have, you just have to guess and it becomes a totally ridiculous game of 20 questions.”
Congressman Amash’s displeasure over Congress’ neutered role when it comes to the NSA does not stop him from frequently quoting the words of Ronald Reagan—despite Reagan’s responsibility for supplanting Congress in this regard—particularly when it comes to The Gipper’s declaration that “libertarianism is the heart and soul of conservatism.”
The use of the Executive Order has long been controversial, dating back to President Abraham Lincoln’s use of the device to suspend habeas corpus along the Philadelphia to Washington line in response to the assault on Union troops in Baltimore.
What made Lincoln’s move so dramatic is that the suspension of habeas corpus is placed by the Founding Fathers in Article I of the Constitution—the section that lays out the powers reserved for Congress.
However, as Jennifer Weber of the New York Times notes in her excellent piece on Lincoln’s use and abuse of power, the Founders “muddied the water” on just who could order a suspension of habeas corpus by writing, “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
Whether you view Lincoln’s actions as a proper exercise of power by the Commander-In-Chief during a time of emergency, or blatant defiance of the Constitution by the President of the United States, I don’t recall too many modern Americans—Democrat, Republican or otherwise—referring to Abraham Lincoln as a “lawless” president.
Nor do I recall many of the Republicans who worship at alter of Ronald Wilson Reagan referring to him as a “lawless” president.
None of this is to say that Presidents Lincoln, Reagan, Obama—or the many other American presidents who have relied upon the executive order—are acting in obedience to our Constitution or that they are not. That is up to the Courts to decide.
What it is to say is that, once again, consistency must count for something.
If you disagree with what President Obama might have in mind to do through the use of the executive order, you may have constitutional authority to back you up. Indeed, I acknowledge my own concerns about presidents who go around Congress’ lawmaking authority by using the executive order, no matter how much I may disapprove of our current and recent incarnations of Congress.
However, to take the tact of accusing Mr. Obama of a “lawless presidency”, while lauding previous presidents who did the identical thing, is just so much more hypocrisy on the part of leaders like Congressman Ryan who are far more wedded to the process of scoring political points than they are to remaining true to history or governing with good intent.
Or could it be that people like Paul Ryan—a man who holds a great deal of power and responsibility in our government—are simply ignorant of our history and the subject matter upon which they deign to expound?
Either way, there is little comfort to be gained when our system is so disgustingly politicized that a president is accused of lawlessness when following in the very same footsteps of previous presidents hailed as some of the greatest heroes of the nation.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, February 3, 2014
“When Women Have Options”: Obamacare, The Greatest Pro-Life Victory Ever
A new report finds that between 2008 and 2011, the abortion rate hit its lowest point since 1973, when Roe v. Wade declared access to the procedure a Constitutional right.
The rate fell 13 percent to 16.9 per 1,000 women in 2011, down from its peak of 29.3 per 1,000 in 1981.
While conservatives want to claim credit for the decline with onerous restrictions on a woman’s right to choose, the availability of contraception and family planning deserve most of the credit, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel Jones, the lead author of the study.
“The decline in abortions coincided with a steep national drop in overall pregnancy and birth rates,” she said in a statement. “Contraceptive use improved during this period, as more women and couples were using highly effective, long-acting reversible contraceptive methods, such as the IUD. Moreover, the recent recession led many women and couples to want to avoid or delay pregnancy and childbearing.”
Use of contraceptives has become near-universal and more common among married women than single.
Obamacare’s birth control mandate obligates all insurers to cover contraception without a co-pay, as it does all preventive care. Before the law 28 states already had such mandates in place and 85 percent of large firms offered coverage as part of their plans. Since August 1 of last year, that coverage is now standard for women no matter where they live or how they acquire health insurance.
A Washington University study released last year showed that providing birth control at no cost reduced the rate of abortions by 62 to 78 percent compared to the national rate. Meanwhile the right’s strategy of reducing abortions by requiring sonograms has had no effect on a large majority of women, according to a new study in Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Instead of encouraging the pro-life benefits of Obamacare, conservatives continue to try to minimize them. Republicans want to give employers the ability to opt out of the mandate, asserting falsely that some of the birth control options available induce abortion.
By opposing the mandate, the right reveals that its goal has always been to reduce women’s options, not unintended pregnancies. Obamacare will reduce thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of abortions and could reduce even more if the Republican-led states that rejected Medicaid expansion would agree to provide subsidized care to approximately 4 million Americans.
Instead, so-called “pro-lifers” enable politicians who deny health insurance to those who need it most, threatening the lives of thousands. If only they were as pro-life as Obamacare is.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, February 4, 2014
“The Vehemence And Vindictiveness”: I Used To Like Chris Christie, But Now I’m Beginning To Worry That He’s A Thug
I generally vote Democratic in presidential elections because I generally agree with the Democrats on social and other issues.
(Democrats are generally for “small government” on social issues, for example, whereas today’s Republicans often want to restrict choice, legislate personal morality, link Christian church and state, and otherwise have the government intrude in places where I don’t think the government should be, which I find annoying and un-American.)
That said, I’m sympathetic to some Republican views on fiscal conservatism and personal responsibility, and I don’t think the answer to every problem is “more government.” In some areas, in fact, I think the answer is probably “less government.”
So, if the Republicans were ever to produce a presidential candidate I like who is reasonable on social issues and strong and smart on economics (as opposed to being an ideologue), I would make the ideal “swing voter” who might help the Republicans capture the White House again.
For the last couple of years, I have thought that this Republican candidate might be Chris Christie, the famous governor of New Jersey.
I find Christie’s views on some social issues (gay marriage, for example) offensive and un-American. But I like his no-nonsense, practical approach to the budget and getting things done. And I love the fact that he’s willing to say and do things that run counter to the Republican Party’s talking points. This shows independence of thought and fortitude that I admire and like.
So I was thinking that it might be possible that I would end up voting for Chris Christie, who seemed to be the obvious Republican front-runner.
But now I’m increasingly worried that Chris Christie is a thug.
This is not just because of the order-up-a-traffic-jam-to-punish-a-political-opponent scandal.
Yes, that’s bad, and, regardless of whether Christie knew about it or ordered it, it reflects badly on the tone of leadership he sets in his administration. But subordinates do sometimes do things that their bosses are horrified by, and, for now, I am willing to believe that it’s possible that Christie really did know nothing about it and was actually shocked and appalled when it was brought to his attention.
It’s also the way Christie is behaving now that the traffic scandal has been exposed.
First, he torched the deputy chief of staff who ordered the traffic jam. Yes, he had to reprimand and disown her, but even if Christie didn’t implicitly sanction the jam, he could have done more to show how bizarrely out of character this behavior was for his administration and how disappointed and betrayed he felt.
Second, and far more saliently, he has now completely torched a former political ally — the guy who actually created the traffic jam. In a startlingly long and harsh statement released yesterday, Christie’s team invoked the man’s behavior in high school to nuke his credibility. The man’s high school social studies teacher, Christie’s team triumphantly reported, once accused him of doing something deceptive.
(Something deceptive? What, exactly? And if the man did, once, in high school, do something that someone found deceptive, is this really relevant 30 years later? Has Chris Christie never, ever done something deceptive? Never? Even in high school?)
Yes, this man’s assertion that Chris Christie knew about (and, therefore, sanctioned, if not directly ordered) the traffic jam has the potential to destroy Christie’s political career.
But still … the vehemence and vindictiveness of Christie’s attack on the man was startling.
This sort of attack doesn’t make Christie look like an independent, statesmanlike leader who has the fortitude to make hard decisions and stand up for what he believes.
It makes him look like a thug.
And I don’t want to vote for a president who is a thug.
By: Henry Blodget, Business Insider, February 2, 2014
“Delusions Of Failure”: How Republicans Are Deceiving Voters And Deceiving Themselves
The Republican response to the State of the Union was delivered by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican representative from Washington — and it was remarkable for its lack of content. A bit of uplifting personal biography, a check list of good things her party wants to happen with no hint of how it plans to make them happen.
The closest she came to substance was when she described a constituent, “Bette in Spokane,” who supposedly faced a $700-a-month premium hike after her policy was canceled. “This law is not working,” intoned Ms. McMorris Rodgers. And right there we see a perfect illustration of just how Republicans are trying to deceive voters — and are, in the process, deceiving themselves.
I’ll get back to “Bette in Spokane” in a minute, but first, is Obamacare “not working”?
Everyone knows about the disastrous rollout, but that was months ago. Since then, health reform has been steadily making up lost ground. At this point enrollments in the health exchanges are only about a million below Congressional Budget Office projections, and rising faster than projected. So a best guess is that by the time 2014 enrollment closes on March 31, there will be more than six million Americans signed up through the exchanges, versus seven million projected. Sign-ups might even meet the projection.
But isn’t Obamacare in a “death spiral,” in which only the old and sick are signing up, so that premiums will soon soar? Not according to the people who should know — the insurance companies. True, one company, Humana, says that the risk pool is worse than it expected. But others, including WellPoint and Aetna, are optimistic (which isn’t a contradiction: different companies could be having different experiences). And the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has run the numbers, finds that even a bad risk pool would have only a minor effect on premiums.
Now, some, perhaps many, of those signing up on the exchanges aren’t newly insured; they’re replacing their existing policies, either voluntarily or because those policies didn’t meet the law’s standards. But those standards are there for a reason — the same reason health insurance is now mandatory. Health reform won’t work if people go uninsured, then sign up when they get sick. It also can’t work if currently healthy people only buy fig-leaf insurance, which offers hardly any coverage.
And what this means, in turn, is that while we don’t know yet how many people will be newly insured under reform, we do know that even those who already had insurance are, on average, getting much better insurance. Since the goal of health reform was to make Americans more secure — to reduce their risk of being unable to afford needed health care, or of facing financial ruin if they get sick — the law is doing its job.
Which brings me back to Bette in Spokane.
Bette’s tale had policy wonks scratching their heads; it was hard to see, given what we know about premiums and how the health law works, how anyone could face that large a rate increase. Sure enough, when a local newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, contacted Bette Grenier, it discovered that the real story was very different from the image Ms. McMorris Rodgers conveyed. First of all, she was comparing her previous policy with one of the pricier alternatives her insurance company was offering — and she refused to look for cheaper alternatives on the Washington insurance exchange, declaring, “I wouldn’t go on that Obama website.”
Even more important, all Ms. Grenier and her husband had before was a minimalist insurance plan, with a $10,000 deductible, offering very little financial protection. So yes, the new law requires that they spend more, but they would get far better coverage in return.
So was this the best story Ms. McMorris Rodgers could come up with? The answer, probably, is yes, since just about every tale of health reform horror the G.O.P. has tried to peddle has similarly fallen apart once the details were revealed. The truth is that the campaign against Obamacare relies on misleading stories at best, and often on outright deceit.
Who pays the price for this deceit? In many cases, American families. Although health care enrollment is actually going pretty well at this point, thousands and maybe millions of Americans have failed to sign up for coverage because they believe the false horror stories they keep hearing.
But conservative politicians aren’t just deceiving their constituents; they’re also deceiving themselves. Right now, Republican political strategy seems to be to stall on every issue, and reap the rewards from Obamacare’s inevitable collapse. Well, Obamacare isn’t collapsing — it’s recovering pretty well from a terrible start. And by the time that reality sinks in on the right, health reform will be irreversible.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 2, 2014
“It’s Lonely At The Top”: Will Republicans Ever Realize That Deifying Business Owners Is Bad Politics?
Last week, congressional Republicans got together at a Chesapeake Bay resort to contemplate their political fortunes. In one presentation, House Minority Leader Eric Cantor delivered a bit of shocking news to his colleagues: Most people are not, in fact, business owners. It would be a good idea, he suggested, if they could find a way to appeal to the overwhelming majority of Americans who work for somebody else. Their aspirations don’t necessarily include opening up their own store or coming up with an amazing new product, so the prospect of lowering the corporate tax rate or slashing environmental regulations may not make their pulses quicken with excitement. They’re more concerned with the availability of jobs, the security of health care, and the affordability of education. “Could it actually have taken Republicans that long to realize they should address such problems, especially when Democrats have made huge gains appealing directly to middle-class voters?” asked conservative journalist Byron York, who reported on the meeting. “Apparently, yes. And even now, not all House Republicans are entirely on board. ‘It’s something that’s been growing and taking time for members to get comfortable with,’ says a House GOP aide, ‘because they did spend the last decade talking about small business owners.'”
You’re probably surprised at the Republicans’ surprise. But it isn’t so much about a numerical misconception—I’m sure that with the possible exception of a couple of the most lunkheaded Tea Partiers, the GOP members of Congress don’t actually think that most Americans own businesses—as it is about a moral hierarchy they’ve spent so much time building up, both in their rhetoric and their own minds.
We all believe that some people are just more important than others, and for conservatives, no one is more important than business owners. Remember how gleeful they were when President Obama said “you didn’t build that” when discussing businesses during the 2012 campaign? Sure, he was taken out of context (he was talking about roads and bridges, not the businesses themselves), but Republicans genuinely believed they had found the silver bullet that would take him down. He had disrespected business owners! Surely all America would be enraged and cast him from office! They made it the theme of their convention. They printed banners. They wrote songs about it. And they were bewildered when it didn’t work.
Just like those members of Congress listening incredulously to Eric Cantor, they couldn’t grasp that the whole country didn’t share their moral hierarchy. After years of worrying primarily about the concerns of people who own businesses, they’ve elevated to gospel truth that the businessman’s virtue is unassailable, that his rewards are justly earned, and that no effort should be spared to remove all obstacles from his path. When it comes down to a choice between, say, a business owner who would like to pay his employees as little as possible and a group of employees who’d like to be paid more, conservatives don’t just see the choice as a simple one, they can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t agree.
As a liberal, I have a different view, precisely because I don’t place the businessman at the top of my moral hierarchy. As a society we need entrepreneurs, but there are many kinds of people we need. To be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with business owners, just that the guy who owns the widget factory isn’t necessarily a better person than the guy who works on the line making widgets. Owning a business can be difficult and challenging, but so can a lot of things. I know business owners who work very hard to succeed. I also know teachers who get up at 5 in the morning every day to grade papers and plan lessons, and nurses who have to comfort the dying and change people’s bedpans. Those jobs are hard, too. And they don’t come with the prospect of great wealth if you’re good at them.
That matters too, to both liberals and conservatives. Many conservatives find wealth to be a marker of virtue—not a perfect marker, maybe, but pretty close. If you’re rich, they plainly believe, it’s probably because you worked hard for your money, and if you’re poor it’s probably because you’re lazy and unreliable. Things like unemployment insurance and food stamps only reward the indolent. The bootstraps are just there waiting to be tugged on, and if you haven’t grabbed a firm hold you have no one to blame but yourself.
As for the businesspeople themselves, it’s little wonder that so many find warmth in the embrace of the GOP, nor that they are shocked and appalled when other people criticize them. The venture capitalist Tom Perkins may have come in for a ton of ridicule when he wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal suggesting the possibility that liberals will soon be rounding up rich people and herding them into death camps (“I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich'”), but Perkins—a guy who once killed a man with his yacht—was surely speaking for more than a few of his peers. In the Republican party they find not only tireless advocacy for policies that will help them hold and expand their wealth, but the love and admiration they so clearly crave.
In 2012 on Labor Day, that same Eric Cantor tweeted, “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business, and earned their success.” Even on the day created to honor working people, the only Americans for whom he could spare a thought were business owners. Perhaps in the year and a half since, he has come to a new awareness that even if you work for someone else, like most of us do, you’re still worthy of consideration. Whether his party agrees—and whether they’ll do anything about it—is another question entirely.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 3, 2014
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