Crimes Against Liberty (15 page)

Most notably, Obama’s the guy whose attorney general pushed for criminalizing the previous administration based on a difference in legal and political opinions—pejoratively dubbed “torture memos”—concerning enhanced interrogation techniques. It was not enough to slander his predecessor and CIA operatives; Obama was determined to use the force of criminal law to punish them. This, despite the fact that congressional Democrats had been briefed about interrogation techniques more than thirty times since 2002, and had approved funding for the program.
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Obama’s partisanship is not confined to the national level—he habitually injects himself into state-level politics as well. The
Washington Post
reported that the White House played a critical, behind-the-scenes role in convincing Dede Scozzafava, Republican candidate from New York’s 23
^rd
Congressional District, to endorse Democrat Bill Owens after she suspended her campaign. The administration later downplayed their role in the Scozzafava episode, which they hoped to exploit in order to convey the impression there was a major splintering in the Republican Party and that it had become a narrow home for extremist conservatives. This kind of local interference by the Obama team even upset some Democrats. After the White House reportedly attempted to dissuade New York governor David Paterson, a Democrat, from seeking reelection in 2010, the
New York Times
noted that “some Democrats expressed anger at what they saw as heavy-handed tactics by the president’s political team.”
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SHUTTING REPUBLICANS OUT OF THE PROCESS

From the beginning of Obama’s relentless drive to impose his agenda of “fundamental change” on America, he talked bipartisan and acted partisan. Had a Republican president behaved in such a flagrantly partisan way, the mainstream media would have gone ballistic. House Republican whip Eric Cantor grumbled, “In 2009, on the rare occasion when we were invited to the White House, the President paid Republican proposals lip service while cameras were on, only to completely rebuff those ideas afterward.”
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Obama’s agenda was so radical he rarely secured any Republican congressional support for his initiatives, and when he did it was only the very liberal ones from the blue states. His $800 billion stimulus bill was supported by just three Senate Republicans—if you can call them that—on the cloture vote. Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter (who later switched parties) voted with fifty-six Democrats and two independents to thwart a filibuster.

As they rammed the stimulus through Congress, Obama and his congressional Democrats were determined to shut Republicans out of the process. The president met with congressional Republicans on the stimulus just one day before Democrats completed drafting the 1,073-page bill. As Karl Rove pointed out, there was no effort to consult and exchange ideas; it was merely a photo-op.
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Republican Conference chairman Mike Pence told
Human Events
, “I think the American people deserve to know that legislation that would comprise an amount equal to the entire discretionary budget of the United States of America is being crafted without a single House Republican in the room.”
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Senator Charles E. Grassley protested that he and his fellow Republicans had been prevented from offering amendments. “I’m not convinced the majority wanted to have open debate and take votes on many of these amendments including mine,” said Grassley. “It’s too bad because this bill still can be made a bipartisan bill.” Senator James Inhofe noted, “This is the largest spending in the history of mankind, the largest spending in the history of the world. It’s something that we should not let happen, but it is going to happen right down party lines.”

Similarly, Senator Mitch McConnell complained, “This package, had it been developed in genuine consultation, could have had a different result.” McConnell criticized the White House for excluding Republicans from the process, remarking, “At the end of the day, it was—the administration decided—let the package be developed in Congress by the majority, and old habits die hard. You know, there was no meaningful consultation in the early part of the process. So if you don’t have that on the takeoff, you don’t end up having it on the landing.”
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The Obama adminstration engaged in similar partisan opportunism on the “jobs bill” in February 2010. They initially praised a bipartisan bill by senators Baucus and Grassley, but they defended Senate majority leader Harry Reid when he moved to scuttle the bill and replace it with a solely Democrat-written measure. Even Democratic senator Blanche Lincoln decried her party’s rank partisanship, exclaiming, “Most Americans don’t honestly believe that a single political party has all the good ideas. We’re not going to accomplish anything until we start governing from the center.” To deflect criticism of Obama’s partisanship, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs assured Republicans they could “trust the president.”
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Toward the end of 2009, when it was increasingly clear Obama’s stimulus plan was a bust, he convened a bogus “jobs summit” to create the impression he was seeking ideas from all quarters to get the economy back on track. But predictably, it was all show. Obama denied invitations to free-market advocates, critics of ObamaCare, and opponents of his demonstrably failed stimulus package, including members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business. Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, observed, “He’s going to get lots of recommendations to spend more money. These [jobs summit attendees] are the very same people who gave us the stimulus package. My feeling is we’re not going to get what we need, and that’s a complete change in direction on economic policy.” Economics professor John Coleman of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business added, “My chief concern is that the list features no serious and prominent labor economist, which seems essential to offering a sound, long-run policy to put us on a path of lower unemployment.”
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Whenever his political interests demanded it, Obama portrayed Republicans as pure obstructionists bereft of their own ideas. But when his propaganda began to lose its appeal, especially on healthcare, he needed to pretend to adopt a bipartisan approach. Just as he called the meaningless jobs summit to create the impression he was focusing on unemployment (which his stimulus bill only exacerbated), he convened a healthcare summit “inviting all ideas.” But he didn’t invite obvious essential participants such as Senator Judd Gregg, a ranking Budget Committee member who had recently extended an olive branch to Obama to work on a bipartisan solution to healthcare. Obama also excluded the Budget Committee chairman, Senator Kent Conrad, a Democrat who had shown genuine willingness to cooperate with Republicans.
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As noted, Obama had previously insisted “obstructionist” Republicans had no ideas—forget expanding health savings accounts, tort reform, tax law reform on employer provided insurance, legalizing the purchase of insurance across state lines, eliminating unnecessary but costly mandated coverage, supporting retail health clinics, and providing vouchers for the working poor and chronically uninsured. But now that he needed Republicans as props for his “bipartisan” summit charade, he intimated they actually did have some ideas. He even bragged he was willing to adopt some of them, such as tort reform.

Leading up to the summit, Obama really played up his “bipartisan” shtick. “Despite the political posturing that often paralyzes this town,” he intoned, “there are many issues upon which we can and should agree.... The people who sent us here expect a seriousness of purpose that transcends petty politics. That’s why I’m going to continue to seek the best ideas from either party as we work to tackle the pressing challenges ahead.”
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Obama then proceeded to engage in petty, one-sided politics, rejecting Republican proposals and steamrolling his bill through Congress along party lines.

He orchestrated the entire healthcare summit as an Alinsky-type community organizing tactic to stigmatize Republicans as the “Party of No.” Thankfully, this time the Republicans didn’t take it sitting down. They stated publicly that Obama had been mischaracterizing them as partisans when he had closed them out of the process from the beginning. House minority whip Eric Cantor told the
Washington Times
in October 2009 that after offering their ideas on healthcare to Obama in May, they heard nothing from him. “No matter what the cry is from the White House, no matter what the president claims, they have not engaged with us,” said Cantor. “The White House at this point has shut down, as far as any kind of engagement. I think that the last time that we as a Republican leadership were at the White House was in May, and that’s when they called us in at the beginning of the health care discussion so that they could get our ideas. . . . Boehner and I sent a letter to the White House in response to that request. Nothing.”
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House GOP leader John Boehner revealed that in response to their message, the administration sent a terse letter indicating they had healthcare reform under control .
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Republican congressman Tom Price commented,

You’ll have to excuse us for questioning the sincerity of the President’s newfound desire to work together. As Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, virtually every week in 2009, we requested to meet with the President to discuss health care and other central issues. Each time, a polite “thank you” email from the White House was the extent of our bipartisan discussions. It’s interesting that only now—once his big-government dream is on political life support—does the President see a use for Republicans. And it appears that use may be more political than rooted in policy goals .
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As Price went on to say, it’s a pretty tough sell for the president to paint Republicans as the roadblock to this bill when he enjoyed a 77-seat majority in the House and fifty-nine Democratic senators, and he still had to resort to political bribery and ruthless threats in order to get the bill approved.

Obama’s partisan approach to healthcare simply reflected the governing style he adopted as soon as he took office. With his first major legislative initiative, the $800 billion stimulus package, his idea of bipartisanship was essentially to say he’d considered all Republican proposals before rejecting them. It was clear from the beginning he would not consider any ideas to reduce the grand scale of his plan. He might show some movement on “the crumbs,” but not “the pie,” as his National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers said. Yet upon making that very statement, Summers added that the president “has been prepared to walk a long mile for bipartisan support,”
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apparently confident the public wouldn’t notice the contradiction.

Overall, for Obama, “bipartisanship” means Republicans supporting his agenda and refraining from engaging in activities he condemns as partisan—even though as a U.S. senator he had engaged in those activities himself. For example, as president he blasted Republicans for using “holds” to delay consideration of his nominees, when he had done precisely the same to President George W. Bush’s selections.
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In his weekly radio address, he said Republicans should “avoid the political posturing and ideological brinksmanship that has bogged down this (nomination) process, and Congress in the past.” Yet, he played a “unique role in history as the first US President to have ever voted to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee”—now-Justice Samuel Alito.
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But for a guy who worked so hard to depict himself as bipartisan, indeed post-partisan, he didn’t cover his tracks very well. Often he couldn’t contain his true combative nature—as when he imperiously warned the nation’s mayors that although they have a friend in the White House, he would use the “full power” of his presidency to “call them out” if they misused any of their stimulus funds.
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He issued the same admonitions to congressional Republicans.

In his remarks to a Joint Session of Congress on healthcare in September 2009, he warned, “But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than to improve it. I won’t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not . . . accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.”
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It was during that speech that Joe Wilson shouted, “You lie” and “Not true” when Obama claimed ObamaCare would not cover illegal immigrants or fund abortion.
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While Democrats widely condemned Wilson for his supposedly unprecedented display of disrespect, many of these critics were part of the group that displayed far worse disrespect for President Bush in the same setting, booing and heckling him during his 2005 State of the Union speech.
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