Donald Sensing penned an interesting blog post the other day. He doesn’t believe another Republican will ever be President. In the post he pointed to a court ruling meant about nothing to the Obama regime. An appeals court ruled that Barack Obama was violating the law regarding the closure of a nuclear waste dump site.
In a rebuke to the Obama administration, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been violating federal law by delaying a decision on a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada.
By a 2-1 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the commission to complete the licensing process and approve or reject the Energy Department’s application for a never-completed waste storage site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
In a sharply worded opinion, the court said the nuclear agency was “simply flouting the law” when it allowed the Obama administration to continue plans to close the proposed waste site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The action goes against a federal law designating Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste repository.
And they made a poignant statement
“It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” Kavanaugh wrote. “The commission is simply defying a law enacted by Congress … without any legal basis.”
(emphasis added)
Obama shrugged his shoulders.
As per the commander-in-chief, the NRC has declined to conduct the statutorily mandated Yucca Mountain licensing process. This essentially destroys the project, which the U.S. government has been working on since the early 1980s to be the nation’s sole repository for high-level nuclear waste. In 2010, the NRC, then led by Obama appointee Gregory Jaczko, ordered the licensing process terminated.
It is the tip of the iceberg.
The IRS targeting of conservative groups? Sure it happened, but so what? We’re not stopping.:
In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted.
In closed door testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, the unidentified IRS agent said requests for special tax status from Tea Party groups is being forced into a special “secondary screening” because the agency has yet to come up with new guidance on how to judge the tax status of the groups.
The NSA was guilty of thousands of privacy violations. The regime response? Duck oversight.
It would be easy to read too much into the report. Many of those incidents can be chalked up to carelessness. For instance, a programming error mixed up the 202 area code (Washington, D.C.) with the Egyptian international code and the agency ended up collecting a “large number” of domestic call records.
But other violations — small in number but significant in form — go to the heart of what is so disturbing about the agency’s vacuum cleaner approach to surveillance: It’s too easily abused. One program swept up both foreign and U.S. e-mails for months before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the practice unconstitutional and shut it down.
Still, it’s not even these “mistakes,” as the NSA called them Friday, that are most disturbing. (Though it’s worth asking whether an agency with such access to Americans’ private communications can afford to make thousands of mistakes.)
More bothersome is the hint in the latest disclosures that NSA is trying to hide its excesses from overseers.
Obama’s NLRB appointments were found unconstitutional. He thumbs his nose at the Court.
Following Friday morning’s appeals court ruling that Barack Obama’s “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional, union attorney (and current NLRB chairman) Mark Gaston Pearce vowed to ignore the court’s ruling.
In a statement posted on the NLRB’s website, Pearce stated:
“The Board respectfully disagrees with today’s decision and believes that the President’s position in the matter will ultimately be upheld. It should be noted that this order applies to only one specific case, Noel Canning, and that similar questions have been raised in more than a dozen cases pending in other courts of appeals.
In the meantime, the Board has important work to do. The parties who come to us seek and expect careful consideration and resolution of their cases, and for that reason, we will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decisions.”
“The parties who come to us seek and expect careful consideration and resolution of their cases…”
Wait. What?!?
Obama is raising taxes without Congress and is spending the proceeds as he see fit:
If you like your ridiculously high cell phone bill, there’s good news: President Obama wants to make it even higher! The president is pushing a plan to raise money by hiking cell phone fees and use the revenue generated to wire up local schools with high-speed Internet access. The idea of allowing states and towns to figure out how to pay for their own Internet access is evidently anathema to this administration, as is the idea that government should stay within its constitutional boundaries.
He’s also planning to do this without input from Congress, via the Federal Communications Commission, according to the Washington Post. Congress, not the executive branch, is empowered by the Constitution with the ability to levy or reject taxes.
By circumventing Congress, the president would also avoid hearings, debate, and give and take — what we used to call the legislative process. Now it’s just the government and its functionaries blackmailing the citizenry.
Obama reveals the existence of sealed indictments if he is of a mind to do so.
The DNC collects information on you from your neighbors:
Of course that is desperation on the Democrats’ part. Trying to deflect attention from the White House invading people’s privacy, the Democratic National Committee is making real news by admitting flag@whitehouse.gov was used to collect data on people being turned in by third parties.
And the response from Congress?
As the lawless scandals are exposed — Benghazi, gunrunning in Mexico, misuse of the NSA, the IRS crippling the opposition in 2012 by illegal denials of tax exemptions — the president and his allies have been fast and furious in ginning up his base by playing the race card so often it’s worn to a mere stub.
Still, to the outrage of many the media and his followers insist we must treat him as if he were a sacred cow.
President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.
Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”
He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”
Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.
Granted, any president may decline to enforce statutes he believes are unconstitutional. But Obama is making no such claim here. Basically, he is admitting that parts of law are impossible to enforce on the deadlines imposed by Congress — deadlines he signed into law. He’s also admitting he doesn’t want to have Congress make these changes, for fear that if lawmakers get their mitts on this unpopular program, they would at least debate far more extensive changes than he’d like.
Congressional Democrats, and some Republicans, may agree with the numerous delays, changes and special favors. But the president invites chaos when he picks which parts of Obamacare to enforce, and which, in retrospect, he has decided are unworkable or unwise.
In a recent news conference, Obama acknowledged that congressional modification of the law is preferable to these White House fiats: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up (House Speaker John Boehner) and say, ‘You know what? This is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. … Let’s make a technical change of the law.’ That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do, but we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to, quote-unquote, ‘Obamacare.”’
Tweaks? Obama isn’t making tweaks. He’s trying to circumvent major flaws that began flaring when the law was enacted. Hence the many carve-outs, delays and special deals that have been piling up since he added his signature to Obamacare on March 23, 2010.
Obamacare doesn’t work. But back to Sensing:
The goal of the entire Democrat party is to be the permanent, sole political authority in the country. This is the actual transformation that Barack Obama promised to great applause in his 2008 campaign. And we are getting transformed good and hard:
[I]nstead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.
Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama’s expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever.
The media will not examine Obama’s imperialist manner because they do not want to. They agree with it. The courts are literally unable to enforce their rulings contra this administration; Obama ignores them at will and without consequence. The Republicans are dominated by the Political Class and lack the numbers, influence, collective will and ideological conviction to rein in the administration even if they had the ability to do so, which they don’t.
I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that Obama had been monitoring all GOP communications.
And one wonders what would happen if Obama evoked Executive Authority (after all, it’s not a “normal political environment”) and decided not to leave office. Courts mean nothing, the Senate wouldn’t mind and the House is full of spineless GOP cowards. If you search for the definition of the word “obsequious” you’ll find “See: White House Press Corps”
Who’d force him out? Besides, that’d be racist.
What would tyranny look like in America? Look around.
Will no one stop him?
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.