Tag Archives: regulation

What’s Next?

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Yesterday I wrote about compromise.  Today, from Marc Thiessen at AEIDeas, here’s what we can expect given that compromise, over the next four years.  This comes against the backdrop of our—as usual—conflicted view of what we want (resolution of which puts a premium on two things: an honest press establishment and the conservatives among us doing a better job of getting our message out.  The lack of the former is no excuse for our not doing the latter, however).

Exit polls show that by a margin of 52-43, Americans want less government, not more.  By a margin of 63-33 they do not want to raise taxes to balance the budget.   And by a margin of 49-45, they want Obamacare either partially or entirely repealed.

With those clearly expressed requirements, which we’ve been expressing for the last two years, we re-elected President Obama and a Democrat-controlled Senate—while reelecting a Republican-controlled House.

Now those expectations:

  1. Obamacare will now become a permanent feature of the American political landscape.  It will never be repealed.
  2. The unprecedented levels of spending in Obama’s first four years will become the new floor, as America sets new records for fiscal profligacy and debt.
  3. Job creators will face massive tax increases, and more Americans will come off the tax rolls—resulting in fewer citizens with a stake in keeping taxes low and more with a stake in protecting benefits.
  4. Government dependency, already at record levels, will continue to grow.
  5. Four lost years in dealing with the entitlement crisis will become eight—digging us into a hole from which we may not be able to emerge.
  6. Obama, unworried about the impact of gas and electricity prices on his reelection, will finally wage the regulatory war on fossil fuels the Left demands.
  7. He will unleash the Environmental Protection Agency to impose crushing new burdens on US business.
  8. His administration’s assault on religious freedom will go on and expand to new areas.
  9. The Defense Department will be gutted, with cuts so deep that America will no longer be a superpower.
  10. Obama will almost certainly have the opportunity to appoint more liberal Supreme Court justices, possibly replacing conservatives on the high court—ending the Roberts court in all but name for a generation.

Hmm….

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According to Matthew Payne in The Wall Street Journal, Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Barack Obama held a rally on the University of Wisconsin campus last Thursday.  But there were conditions attached for the students’ to gain permissiontickets to attend.

In order to get a ticket for the speech, students were forced to go to Mr. Obama’s campaign website and pledge their support for the president—in the process giving the Obama campaign a gold mine of contact information in a key swing state.

Worse, the University was complicit in this:

The university even provided direct links to the website—free advertising to 40,000 students in one of Mr. Obama’s most important demographics.

Can we afford four years of a more “flexible” President, even less accountable than he recognizes himself to be today?

Welfare, Work, and the Stimulus

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It turns out Obama’s HHS waiver of the work requirement for welfare (in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, signed into law by President Bill Clinton) wasn’t the first Obama waiver of the work requirement.  No, it’s just one more instance of the wealth redistribution in which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama believes so much.

The Congressional Research Service has a new report out, albeit one done at the behest of an Evil Republican, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (the report can be found here or here).  This report demonstrates that the Obama Stimulus Package, drafted up shortly after his inauguration in 2009 and passed just after that also waived the requirement for work in order to get welfare.

Typically the food stamp program requires that group [“able-bodied adults” between 18 and 49 years old who have no dependents] to work or participate in a training program at least 20 hours a week to continue receiving benefits after three months. The stimulus law, though, allowed states to suspend the rule from April 2009 to October 2010—and most states did.

The CRS study showed that in fiscal 2010, the last year for which data was available, the number of food-stamp recipients in that group was at nearly 3.9 million. That’s up from 1.9 million in 2008.

Though food-stamp enrollment was already rising at the time in part due to the recession, the study noted the number in this group “increased more rapidly than the overall caseload.”

Their percentage of that caseload grew from 6.9 percent in 2008 to 9.7 percent in 2010.

This was no effort to accommodate spiking unemployment, though.  Indeed, it never was intended to—unemployment would never rise above 8% and would fall back to 5.5% by the end of 2009 with the stimulus, Obama promised us.  The waiver was, nevertheless, extended beyond 2010.

The latest CRS report noted that while the stimulus law lifted the food stamp work requirement until late 2010, the law allowing extended unemployment benefits likewise allowed most states to waive those work requirements in 2011 and 2012.

Bread and circuses.

Is AARP Tax-Exempt?

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The short answer is yes—it’s a 501(c)4 non-profit.  Follow-up question: should it continue in that status?

If the information outlined in Kimberly Strassel’s Wall Street Journal article last Friday is accurate, I suggest the follow-up’s answer should be “No.”

…AARP worked through 2009-10 as an extension of a Democratic White House, toiling daily to pass [Obamacare].  We know that despite AARP’s awareness that its seniors overwhelmingly opposed the bill, the “nonpartisan membership organization” chose to serve the president’s agenda.

71 pages of emails tell the story.  For instance,

As early as July 2009, Mr. Sloane [AARP Senior Vice President David] was sending the administration—”as promised”—his “message points” on Medicare.  Ms. DeParle [an Obama senior aide Nancy-Ann] assured him “I think you will hear some of your lines tomorrow” in President Obama’s speech—which he did.  Mr. Rother [AARP Policy Chief John] advised the White House on its outreach, discouraging Mr. Obama from addressing seniors since “he may not be the most effective messinger [sic]…at least to the McCain constituency.”  Better to manage these folks, he counsels, through the “authoritative voices of doctors and nurses.”

And

Ms. LeaMond [AARP Executive Vice President Nancy] worried that the Medicare spin wasn’t working against public criticism of the bill.  She emailed Mr. Messina [another Obama senior aide Jim] and Ms. DeParle that she was “seized” with “concerns about extended coherent, strong messaging by Republicans on the Medicare savings.”  To pull off the legislation, she mused, “we”—the White House and AARP—will need a “concerted strategy.”

And so on, including AARP internal polling passed on to DeParle and Messina that indicated AARP’s membership opposed the developing Obamacare by 98%.  This last isn’t legally relevant to AARP’s tax exempt status; it just shows how…out of touch…AARP management was with its membership.

Plainly, the aggregate of these emails demonstrates violation of the non-partisan requirement for such non-profits.

RTWT.

Our Judiciary’s Selective Enforcement

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The Ninth Circuit strikes again.  The Ninth agreed with a Federal district court that an Idaho law that lets state authorities bring criminal charges against pregnant women who seek abortions by using medications purchased online would likely be found unconstitutional (the Ninth Circuit ruling can be found here).  The Ninth, however, overruled the lower court’s enforcement injunction, saying it was too broad.  Instead, the Ninth substituted its own injunction: state authorities are enjoined only from enforcing the Idaho law against the particular woman who brought the case, not from enforcing the law everywhere else.

The WSJ‘s Law Blog provides a summary of the case:

In May 2011, Mark Hiedeman, the prosecuting attorney in Bannock County, Idaho, brought criminal charges against Jennie Linn McCormack, an unmarried mother of three, after she purchased medications over the Internet in 2010 to terminate her pregnancy.  There are no licensed healthcare providers who offer abortions in southeastern Idaho and Ms McCormack, who didn’t want to have additional children, claimed the medications were prescribed by a physician outside of Bannock County.

The lower court set aside the case against McCormack and enjoined the prosecutor from enforcing the law against anyone on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Set aside your views of abortion for a moment, and consider what this appellate court has done vis-à-vis the injunction.

The law under which Hiedeman attempted to prosecute McCormack was found by the district court to be unconstitutional, and the Ninth agreed: it is likely be found unconstitutional.  Yet the Ninth then overruled the district court’s injunction against enforcing that law at all.

Their logic centers on the premise that the law has not yet, in fact, been found unconstitutional, and so the original broad injunction went too far.  Yet injunctions, by their nature, are temporary—even permanent ones, which can be withdrawn for any number of reasons at any later date when they’re found no longer to be useful.

So where is the harm done by the lower court’s broader injunction?  The state is harmed by not being able to enforce a law that is, nominally, legitimate.  Women are harmed by being threatened with prosecution—and potentially prosecuted and convicted—for acting as McCormack did and who is protected from prosecution for those same actions by the injunction as modified by the Ninth.  The women who are under the gun here, also are in a time-sensitive situation: their pregnancy must be terminated promptly, or not at all.  We the People are harmed by this court’s announcement that selective enforcement of a law, as a matter of state policy, is entirely legitimate.

This is a rule of law question, regardless of what we might think of the legitimacy of abortion itself.