SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Politics : Politics for Conservatives -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Neeka who wrote (17891)10/4/2013 2:34:58 AM
From: KLP4 Recommendations

Recommended By
garrettjax
Jack Be Quick
Neeka
Sdgla

  Respond to of 125443
 
Krauthammer has a say in the Obama/Obamacare/Debt Ceiling matters.....Who Shut Down Yellowstone?

Who shut down Yellowstone?
By Charles Krauthammer, E-mail the writer


The Obamacare/shutdown battle has spawned myriad myths. The most egregious concern the substance of the fight, the identity of the perpetrators and the origins of the current eruption.

(1) Substance


President Obama indignantly insists that GOP attempts to abolish or amend Obama­care are unseemly because it is “settled” law, having passed both houses of Congress, obtained his signature and passed muster with the Supreme Court.

Yes, settledness makes for a strong argument — except from a president whose administration has unilaterally changed Obama­care five times after its passage, including, most brazenly, a year-long suspension of the employer mandate.

Article I of the Constitution grants the legislative power entirely to Congress. Under what constitutional principle has Obama unilaterally amended the law? Yet when the House of Representatives undertakes a constitutionally correct, i.e., legislative, procedure for suspending the other mandate — the individual mandate — this is portrayed as some extra-constitutional sabotage of the rule of law. Why is tying that amendment to a generalized spending bill an outrage, while unilateral amendment by the executive (with a Valerie Jarrett blog item for spin) is perfectly fine?

(2) Perpetrators

The mainstream media have been fairly unanimous in blaming the government shutdown on the GOP. Accordingly, House Republicans presented three bills to restore funding to national parks, veterans and the District of Columbia government. Democrats voted down all three. (For procedural reasons, the measures required a two-thirds majority.)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t even consider these refunding measures. And the White House has promised a presidential veto.

The reason is obvious: to prolong the pain and thus add to the political advantage gained from a shutdown blamed on the GOP. They are confident the media will do a “GOP makes little Johnny weep at the closed gates of Yellowstone, film at 11” despite Republicans having just offered legislation to open them.

And besides, whence comes the sanctity of the “clean CR,” the single bill (continuing resolution) that funds all of government? The Democrats have declared it inviolable — and piecemeal funding, as proposed by the Republicans, unacceptable on principle. On what grounds? After all, the regular appropriations process consists of 12 separate appropriation bills. The insistence on the “clean CR” is just a fancy way to suggest some principle behind the president’s refusal to compromise or even negotiate.

(3) Origins

The most ubiquitous conventional wisdom is that the ultimate cause of these troubles is out-of-control tea party anarchists.

But is this really where the causal chain ends? The tea party was created by Obama’s first-term overreach, most specifically Obama­care. Today’s frantic fight against it is the echoing result of the way it was originally enacted.

From Social Security to civil rights to Medicaid to Medicare, never in the modern history of the country has major social legislation been enacted on a straight party-line vote. Never. In every case, there was significant reaching across the aisle, enhancing the law’s legitimacy and endurance. Yet Obama­care — which revolutionizes one-sixth of the economy, regulates every aspect of medical practice and intimately affects just about every citizen — passed without a single GOP vote.

The Democrats insist they welcomed contributing ideas from Republicans. Rubbish. Republicans proposed that insurance be purchasable across state lines. They got nothing. They sought serious tort reform. They got nothing. Why? Because, admitted Howard Dean, Democrats didn’t want to offend the trial lawyers.

Moreover, the administration was clearly warned. Republican Scott Brown ran in the most inhospitable of states, Massachusetts, on the explicit promise to cast the deciding vote blocking Obamacare. It was January 2010, the height of the debate. He won. Reid ignored this unmistakable message of popular opposition and conjured a parliamentary maneuver — reconciliation — to get around Brown.




Nothing illegal about that. Nothing illegal about ramming it through without a single opposition vote. Just totally contrary to the modern American tradition — and the constitutional decency — of undertaking major social revolutions with only bipartisan majorities. Having stuffed Obamacare down the throats of the GOP and the country, Democrats are now paying the price.

I don’t agree with current Republican tactics. I thought the defunding demand impossible and, therefore, foolish. I thought that if, nonetheless, the GOP insisted on making a stand, it should not be on shutting down the government, which voters oppose 5-to-1, but on the debt ceiling, which Americans favor 2-to-1 as a vehicle for restraining government.

Tactics are one thing, but substance is another. It’s the Democrats who have mocked the very notion of settled law. It’s the Democrats who voted down the reopening of substantial parts of the government. It’s the Democrats who gave life to a spontaneous, authentic, small-government opposition — a.k.a. the tea party — with their unilateral imposition of a transformational agenda during the brief interval when they held a monopoly of power.

That interval is over. The current unrest is the residue of that hubris.



Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.



To: Neeka who wrote (17891)10/4/2013 9:35:25 AM
From: KLP3 Recommendations

Recommended By
alanrs
J.B.C.
simplicity

  Respond to of 125443
 
Mark Levin: Obama is preparing to destroy the role of Congress by unilaterally ignoring debt ceiling


By Jen Kuznicki On October 4, 2013 ·

(Mark Levin has laid out last night what Obama’s plans are should the Republicans hold the line and refuse to increase the debt ceiling. We have been here before, as I found it important to write about two years ago when Obama and the media were considering the unconstitutional and impeachable option of using the 14th Amendment to bypass Congress on the debt ceiling.

I felt compelled to partially transcribe Mark’s commentary from last night’s show, because it is very important that we get this information to our Republican members of Congress. I have linked to the relevant articles and podcast beneath the transcription. THANK ME! heh..)

LEVIN: This is what I want you to focus on, the word Default. He’s repeatedly using it, he’s repeatedly saying it, that we face

Default…Default.

His billionaire friends from Wall Street who visited with him and then went out on the White House driveway and were saying the same things, “We cannot have a Default.” Which means he was pumping it into them there as well.

So, he’s using it in his interviews, he’s using it in his rabble-rousing speeches, he’s using it in private with these groups that he meets with, Default, Default, Default.

Why is he saying that? Just to scare people? Well, that’s part of it, obviously, but it’s more than that, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Barack Obama is plotting that if he can’t get what he wants, out of the House Republicans, that he can’t get his Plan A, and get Boehner and the Republicans to buckle, not just on the Continuing Resolution, but the Debt Ceiling, then he’s got his Plan B.

His Plan B is the most egregious attack on our Constitution by a President, not just in modern history, but in all of our history, if in fact he unleashes it.

And he’s being urged to do so by Nancy Pelosi, by Bill Clinton, he has in the past, by Dick Durbin, by a long list of phony law professors from liberal institutions, by liberal think-tanks, and what is he being urged to do? He’s being urged to bypass Congress, to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally as President of the United States, using the 14th Amendment as a fig leaf, to seize from Congress, the power of the purse.

That’s what he’s preparing to do, if the Republicans don’t ultimately buckle on the debt ceiling.

So, it is he who is prepared to extort and blackmail in ways that most of you, and most of my colleagues in this business, can’t even imagine or don’t even understand.

And if the President of the United States unilaterally raises the debt ceiling, you can kiss the core functions of Congress goodbye, you can kiss this Republic goodbye, once and for all. And then, I think, the focus can be on the Liberty Amendments, but that is what Obama, his Plan B, is going to do.

Obama keeps talking about Default. Isn’t it interesting? No other President has driven us into Default, because all the other Presidents understand their Constitutions, and understand they have an obligation to work with the other branches of the government. He can’t just say, “I want this,” and that’s the end of that. You try and work it out.

Obama does not want to cut spending, Ladies and Gentlemen, Obama does not want Congress to address all these problems with Obamacare, now I think Congress ought to get rid of it, but he won’t even allow them to make proposals related to it, only he can waive and extend and do whatever he chooses to do with the statute.

So, you see his mindset, his mindset is that of an Imperial President. And he takes things very personally too, “Well, you can’t do that to me, I’m the President, I was elected.”

Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, the President has to comply with the Constitution too, as I say all the time, the Constitution is not up for election. Everyone of these people in Washington are obligated to live within their roles under the Constitution.

So he keeps bringing up Default, he’s doing this purposefully. And he keeps bringing up all these programs that aren’t going to be funded, but what does he do about it? Nothing.

Here’s a perfect example, he’s at a construction company in Maryland today:

OBAMA: “An economic shutdown, that results from Default, would be dramatically worse.”

LEVIN: You get it? You get it, folks? He’s laying the foundation for exactly what I’m saying.

He is going to break the debt ceiling. He is going to spend more than Congress has authorized. He’s preparing to do it, as Plan B, if he doesn’t get all that he wants in “negotiations” with Republicans over the debt ceiling which is coming up in mid-October.

If he can’t get what he wants, he is going to circumvent the United States Constitution, and he will be applauded for it, because he will have, “saved the economy”, “saved Social Security”, “saved the world’s financial system” because we have to pay our bills, you see?

And I smell this a mile away.

And he’s being encouraged repeatedly by pseudo-intellectuals, by Marxists dressed up as Constitutionalists, by people in his own party, he’s being encouraged to conduct himself as a dictator, and to bypass Congress and to bypass the Constitution, why work with him?

They want a full-blown Constitutional crisis. Please, listen to me, this is what they want! So they can continue to shred it! This is why Obama won’t budge, like Clinton did and Carter did and Reagan did and Ford did and Nixon did. He’s the only one who won’t negotiate. This is why. This is his fundamental transformation. And I’m going to keep hollaring this as loudly as I can because more and more people need to see it!

We have in Congress Authorization Laws, and Appropriations Laws. They are different.

The Authorization is authorizing the existence of a program, authorizing the existence of an agency of a Federal department and so on. It doesn’t fund it. It authorizes it.

They have different committees set up for the Authorization part and different committees set up for the Appropriations part. They are separate bills, this writer is telling us what Obama is planning…

READ: Our Outlaw President? Obama Should Ignore the Debt Ceiling Mark spends a lot of time going through this phony’s opinion, and is convinced Obama will in fact, ignore the ceiling if the Republicans hold the line.

LISTEN: The Mark Levin Show Podcast for 10/3/13 pertinent discussion begins at about 33:00 in.

READ: The Debt Limit, The 14th Amendment, and the GOP –takeaway:

“No, the 14th Amendment requires him to pay the interest and principal on Treasury Notes, Bills and Bonds before anything else should there be insufficient funds to cover it all.

John Boehner, it’s time you and the rest of the Republicans shove this fact right up Obama, Pelosi’s and Reid’s a*s, making clear that (1) you will not raise the debt ceiling and (2) you will impeach that rat b*sta*rd if he fails to cover interest and principal as is required by The Constitution.”
jenkuznicki.com