These people aren't "Czars." They are "Commissars."
Van Jones is just a symptom
With all the news coming out almost hourly about Green Czar Van Jones and his connections to so many of the radical agenda such as support cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, suspicions about the Bush administration's foreknowledge of 9/11, accusations that whites are poisoning black communities through pollution, and a whole host of other wacko stances for which Gateway Pundit has become a clearing house of information, there are some real questions that the Obama administration should be forced to answer.
1. Since it's clear that no cursory Secret Service background check would have failed to come up with at least part of this guy's record, why did the White House decide that this guy was so crucial that they could ignore all the warning flags. Jeffrey Lord detailed what, based on his experience in the Reagan White House, the Secret Service goes through to check anyone who is going to show up at the White House. There is no reason to think that the Secret Service has gotten any less competent today, especially with all the advantages that the internet provides for instant research. Or to think that with the first black man in the White House and all the concerns over his safety that they have gotten any less vigilant.
But the question here in the Van Jones case -- as it would have been for me and my Reagan colleagues is very simple. What if I, like the White House guest I had invited, had a police record? Had a seriously questionable set of quite public and quite wacky, well-articulated views captured on video tape? What if I had been a Democrat with a father or older brother in the Ku Klux Klan? What if I had been a John Bircher? What if I had been signing on to documents that accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist? What if I had tagged along with Jane Fonda and gone to North Vietnam to mug for the cameras?
The answer is simple. The only way that I could have gotten a clearance to work for a President Ronald Reagan would be if the President, the First Lady or the Chief of Staff to the President specifically overruled the Secret Service.
That's it. There was then, and surely is now, no other way.
Which is to say, Van Jones is in the White House this minute because someone -- or several someones -- knew his problems and quite deliberately overruled the Secret Service. That would be someone of very considerable power.
We've all been told about the strenuous efforts that the White House has made to vet appointees. These efforts are so stringent that they've complained about the difficulties they've had filling some positions. Did Jones fill out one of those forms? Or was he just waved through since Valerie Jarrett liked him?
So what did the Secret Service recommend about giving this guy clearance in the White House and were they overruled by someone in the Obama inner circle? Why?
And these questions aren't even getting into the root question: what does a green jobs czar do and why should the federal government be doing it? I'm afraid that that solar powered bus has already left the station.
2. And the qualifications of Van Jones are a minor question compared to the bigger question that has been bothering me and others for a while, why is Congress letting the Obama administration get away with having by the latest count 31 so-called czars in their administration. There used to be a time when the Legislative Branch relished its role as a check on the Executive Branch. As Politico reports, the Republican Party is planning to use the brouhaha about Van Jones to raise the larger issue of all the President's czars. Look at that list from Politico of all the czars. Why couldn't these offices have been folded into existing executive departments where the appointees would have undergone Senate confirmation? Congress could have oversight over all these people are doing. Is Robert Byrd the only Democrat who is concerned about what this trend means?
Earlier this year, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) criticized the administration's use of czars as a power grab by the executive branch.
"The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the constitutional system of checks and balances," wrote Byrd. "At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate confirmed officials."
And these czars aren't holding do-nothing jobs with no power whatsoever except to advise the President. Some are helping to oversee all that vast money that Congress has been appropriating for all the overreach that we've been seeing of the federal government into all aspects of our economy. For example, here is a description from an April article in Slate about Van Jones and his position within the administration.
Jones is the switchboard operator for Obama's grand vision of the American economy; connecting the phone lines between all the federal agencies invested in a green economy. The $787 billion stimulus Congress authorized in February had at least $30 billion of green-jobs funding attached to it. It's Jones' responsibility to work within all the government agencies to make sure it gets doled out appropriately. Obama wants a cap-and-trade policy that will eventually force American industry to develop new green technologies that will lead to new green jobs. It's Jones' task to convince the American people that this is a good idea. The administration will have to get employees of dirty-energy companies—companies Jones calls the "pro-polluter status quo"—to believe they'll have jobs in a green economy, too. It's for Jones to sculpt that messaging operation. Jones told me the one thing he's learned in the four weeks he's been in Washington is that "power in D.C. is an illusion. Nobody in D.C. has as much power as they want—not even the president." Maybe Jones should lend Obama some of his.
And all sorts of the other new positions created to oversee the TARP, bailout, and stimulus money being appropriate have been given vast new powers unheard of until this year. One example is the pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg.
>>> The Obama administration scrapped the $500,000 salary cap it proposed for executives at firms receiving large amounts of federal assistance but appointed a pay czar to review, reject and even set pay levels -- with no appeal.
Kenneth Feinberg, the administration's new "special master for compensation," will have broad authority over compensation for senior executives and the top 100 earners at American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., General Motors Corp., GMAC LLC, Chrysler LLC, and Chrysler Financial. All seven companies got what the government calls "exceptional assistance" from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Mr. Feinberg's decisions won't be subject to appeal, and the Treasury Department said he will follow certain principles in making his decisions, including whether compensation rewards risk, allows a firm to remain competitive, is comparable to peers, tied to long-term performance and contributes to the value of the firm. Mr. Feinberg won't receive any government compensation himself.<<<
That's an amazing amount of unappealable power to be given to one person with no check from either the Congress or the courts. As always, turn the tables and ask yourselves what the left would be saying if the Bush administration had created such a position. They'd be screaming and rightly so.
Even beyond the issues of checks and balances, what about the simple concerns of running an effective organization? Having such muddled lines of responsibility can't be the best way to run the Executive Branch. If the federal bureaucracy is such a mess that the only way to get something done is to go outside the original set up and appoint these czars, why don't we see about reforming the system rather than building a whole new layer on top of it?
Yes, we've had such positions before, but never to this extent. And don't the Congressional Democrats realize that, at some point, there will be a Republican in the White House. And by being supine for this President's power grab of czardoms, they will be unable to launch any successful counterstrike when that future GOP president follows Obama's examples.
Betsy's Page (5 September 2009)
betsyspage.blogspot.com |
